Educating clergy as culture‐builders: Can this long tradition be reclaimed?

This article draws implications from my recent study of the first 150 years of Clergy Education in America for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans and working class whites. I focus on the ability of these schools to prepare leaders for various arenas of public life: families, congregations, schools, voluntary associations, and publishing. The implications for today's seminaries include reframing historic pedagogies in the liberal arts, oratory, and debate; the formation of religious charisma and iconic leadership that are socially transmitted; the orientation of interpretive practices of sacred texts and traditions toward symbolic production; the reinvigoration of theologies that enrich faith communities and the public imagination; and reclaiming the missional nature of theological and rabbinical schools through public media, the arts, and populist pedagogies.