Beyond Theological Tourism

So I came across, and read, the book 'Beyond Theological Tourism,' edited by Dr. Thistlethwaite. I found it exciting, but it also left me a little bit sad.



I was so excited because the premise of the book was that professors and students traveled to several places throughout the world to learn about the troubling realities of our global neighbors, then returned to engage in activism with troubling realities closer to home. After all, it all connects. Folks who witnessed child sex workers overseas came home to work with at the Kovler center for treatment of torture survivors here, or in battered women's shelters, and so on. Then they wrote about the experience. For the time in which it was written, it seems pretty revolutionary.



Still, I said, it made me sad. I wonder if this was not an era of initial enthusiasm in seminary education that already has passed. There seem to be so few opportunities like this available for seminarians on the whole, that are truly affirmed and promoted by the schools. Living among the seminaries in Hyde Park, I know that it is really hard to do say, a semester abroad, and the options available for January terms seem rather limited. It also troubles me that so few students who enter the Hyde Park seminaries actually engage in the realities of the City. Speaking of the six seminaries in this area as a group, it seems that far more often students are shuffled off to 'safe' white neighborhoods in the suburbs to do their practicum work. Meanwhile, most are warned not to explore, let alone set foot in, the distressed neighborhoods surrounding our island of wealth and 'security.' And generally, students need to wait until their second year, a crazy busy year, before the seminaries have programming available to support their entry into cross-cultural ministry settings.



I do take hope in the programs that CTS has, between DEPTH and the Center for Community Transformation (CCT), which certainly attracted me to the campus; although I am a little concerned that I need a PCUSA site to complete my denominational requirements. There is a nearby Presbyterian church, but it's not part of the program, and neither is the Woodlawn neighborhood immediately to our south, which I've spent some time in and really care about. So, dunno, what's a seminarian to do?



And I have to cautiously critique that even for a seminary that markets itself as activist and progressive, we talk a good globalization, social justice talk in the classroom, but beyond the confines of these limited-access programs, it's hard for me to see how students and faculty together are really walking all that talk.



By comparison, the undergraduate Lutheran school I attended had about the same number as all our Hyde Park seminaries combined; our professors in the religion department taught us during the regular terms, supported us in our social justice organizing, and traveled with us on spring break service trips and May Terms alike. And our school had more offerings for May Term cross-cultural immersions than all of these seminaries combined. And our college was not unlike many other private liberal arts colleges across the country; and our lives were no less busy than they are now. Wartburg had an ethos of hands-on servant leadership that seminaries mostly don't seem to quite get, not even my newly beloved CTS.


Meanwhile, I have been working on a project and want to take the next steps. What has been an informal network of friends, (in which I function as I wander the various campuses to introduce as many to each other as possible), could be so much bigger. What if students from all the seminaries here started working together to gain just such an education, globally and locally? What if we as students forged the relationships needed to help us learn from Woodlawn? Or the rest of the world?



www.seminaryaction.org is the site I started last spring, and now that I'm getting settled in at my new school well enough I'm also finding the courage to move it forward. And yes, dear friends, there will also be a student newspaper...