GTS Faculty Hires: Studying the Self in Manhattan
Just opened my latest “Dear GTS Alumna/us” letter. As always, it is two-sided, single spaced and probably about an 8 to 10 font. I’m not going to reproduce it and you don’t need the whole thing to know a that…
The place is a business in survival mode: “Our academic programs will foster a collaborative, innovative, project-based model of learning, utilizing the power of technology. Students and faculty from other traditions will enrich our common life…” There are lots of summer short courses, seminars and other quick hitters listed: “Evening and Weekend courses will allow part-time students…to take advantage of what General has to offer for both those seeking degrees and those seeking enrichment.”
The place still talks up a national, international and cosmic witness but is all about Manhattan clientele: “linked with two Episcopal Service Corps communities to provide spiritual direction by GTS students to young adults living in New York City… the physical advantages of our surroundings are known to all of you… special worship opportunities for the whole Church and our greater NYC community… our unique opportunities to learn in , serve and engage the City around us…”
What really struck me were the three new faculty hires. As ever, they are seemingly bright people with plenty of paper credentials, publications and conferences under their belts. But for an institution that says it wants to “encourage the finest leaders to guide Christian witness and social justice through the challenges facing our Church and the world,” you get
A psychoanalyst: The Rev. Dr. Amy Bentley Lamborn recently published “The Fourth Reduction: Carl Jung, Richard Kearney, and the Via Tertia of Otherness.” And she’s lecturing somewhere about… wait for it…
human sexuality.
A writer: “...known throughout the academic world and the Episcopal Church as a writer and editor...His various reviews, articles, translations, and original poetry have appeared in journals secular and theological for many years.”
A Lutheran feminist scholar: “Prof. Shaner’s research interests include… feminist and womanist biblical interpretation… She is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).”
Look, there’s no discipline from which a church leader, especially a parish priest, can’t gain valuable insight. But our reliance on rarefied academic subdisciplines, one-to-one clinical style interactions, and factional agendas at the expense of a shared Gospel do not build leaders, at least not leaders for an effective missionary church.
We continue to “disciple” clergy as chaplains to small, self-referential subgroups. Such clergy don’t really unify because the groups for which they speak are already unified. They don’t lead because chaplains, by definition, are in a support role. They don’t evangelize because they are trained to parrot a message already known and insisted upon by the groups they represent, and bizarre to and excluding those not already in the group.
There must a niche for helping cool folks be all about themselves in Manhattan. I’m sorry to see my seminary in that niche.
The place is a business in survival mode: “Our academic programs will foster a collaborative, innovative, project-based model of learning, utilizing the power of technology. Students and faculty from other traditions will enrich our common life…” There are lots of summer short courses, seminars and other quick hitters listed: “Evening and Weekend courses will allow part-time students…to take advantage of what General has to offer for both those seeking degrees and those seeking enrichment.”
The place still talks up a national, international and cosmic witness but is all about Manhattan clientele: “linked with two Episcopal Service Corps communities to provide spiritual direction by GTS students to young adults living in New York City… the physical advantages of our surroundings are known to all of you… special worship opportunities for the whole Church and our greater NYC community… our unique opportunities to learn in , serve and engage the City around us…”
What really struck me were the three new faculty hires. As ever, they are seemingly bright people with plenty of paper credentials, publications and conferences under their belts. But for an institution that says it wants to “encourage the finest leaders to guide Christian witness and social justice through the challenges facing our Church and the world,” you get
A psychoanalyst: The Rev. Dr. Amy Bentley Lamborn recently published “The Fourth Reduction: Carl Jung, Richard Kearney, and the Via Tertia of Otherness.” And she’s lecturing somewhere about… wait for it…
human sexuality.
A writer: “...known throughout the academic world and the Episcopal Church as a writer and editor...His various reviews, articles, translations, and original poetry have appeared in journals secular and theological for many years.”
A Lutheran feminist scholar: “Prof. Shaner’s research interests include… feminist and womanist biblical interpretation… She is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).”
Look, there’s no discipline from which a church leader, especially a parish priest, can’t gain valuable insight. But our reliance on rarefied academic subdisciplines, one-to-one clinical style interactions, and factional agendas at the expense of a shared Gospel do not build leaders, at least not leaders for an effective missionary church.
We continue to “disciple” clergy as chaplains to small, self-referential subgroups. Such clergy don’t really unify because the groups for which they speak are already unified. They don’t lead because chaplains, by definition, are in a support role. They don’t evangelize because they are trained to parrot a message already known and insisted upon by the groups they represent, and bizarre to and excluding those not already in the group.
There must a niche for helping cool folks be all about themselves in Manhattan. I’m sorry to see my seminary in that niche.
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