{"id":6234,"date":"2006-08-30T09:21:27","date_gmt":"2006-08-30T09:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/want-to-study-theology.html"},"modified":"2006-08-30T09:21:27","modified_gmt":"2006-08-30T09:21:27","slug":"want-to-study-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/want-to-study-theology.html","title":{"rendered":"Want to study theology?"},"content":{"rendered":"

R. R. Reno has a really meaty post over at First Things, evaluating various graduate programs (not just Catholic of course) – across the country.<\/a> Too bad there’s no comments section over there – I imagine it would get hot.<\/p>\n

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The Divinity School at the University of Chicago<\/span><\/a> has problems as well. It has some famous names on staff, but some recent graduate students have told me that the professors are never around. Choosing the right program is very important. Doctoral study is all about intellectual formation, and that cannot be done by faculty who live hundreds of miles away or who are always out lecturing elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The Catholic world has it own set of difficulties. Historically, the Jesuits have dominated graduate study in the United States, and I don\u2019t think I am revealing any secrets when I tell you that the Society of Jesus has committed itself and its institutions to a liberal-revisionist agenda. In the 1970s and 1980s, this may have seemed cutting-edge, but these days it\u2019s pretty tired, and tiresome.<\/p>\n

This complacent liberalism has hurt Jesuit graduate programs even at Boston College<\/span><\/a>, and it has badly injured places like Marquette<\/span><\/a>, Fordham<\/span><\/a>, and St. Louis University<\/span><\/a>. Rahnerians, feminists, liberationists\u2014these places carry some serious ballast. In my experience, intellectual life is too easily perverted into postures of protest and a quixotic quest against the long dead Catholic ghetto. Again, some excellent faculty teach at these places: Ralph Del Colle, Michel Barnes, and Susan Wood, for example, are at Marquette. But because it is a Jesuit program, the 1970s is still going strong.<\/p>\n

I have painted some negative pictures, and I may not be winning popularity contests anytime soon. I\u2019m not saying that a person cannot obtain a serious theological education at Harvard, Yale, Emory, and Chicago, or, for that matter, Marquette and Fordham. But prospective students should know they will have a harder row to hoe. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R. R. Reno has a really meaty post over at First Things, evaluating various graduate programs (not just Catholic of course) – across the country. Too bad there’s no comments section over there – I imagine it would get hot. The Divinity School at the University of Chicago has problems as well. It has some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWant to study theology? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/want-to-study-theology.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Want to study theology? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"R. R. Reno has a really meaty post over at First Things, evaluating various graduate programs (not just Catholic of course) – across the country. Too bad there’s no comments section over there – I imagine it would get hot. The Divinity School at the University of Chicago has problems as well. 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Reno has a really meaty post over at First Things, evaluating various graduate programs (not just Catholic of course) – across the country. Too bad there’s no comments section over there – I imagine it would get hot. The Divinity School at the University of Chicago has problems as well. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}