Business Ethics Journal Article

Of Beltways, Runways, and Sight Lines: Perspectives, Challenges, and Futures of ATS "Global Awareness and Engagement" Lester Edwin J. Ruiz The Association of Theological Schools

ABSTRACT: Providing a century of context for the ATS commitment to global awareness and engagement, the author outlines briefly how that com- mitment has evolved, with a growing recognition of the changing character of "globalization״ and, in that context, the need for diversity, mutuality, respect; and equity among all partners. The article goes on to cite complex dilem- mas and challenges that effective global partnerships must address: defining ministry for a globalizing world, navigating politics and institutional com- mitments, and adjusting approaches to pedagogy, delivery, programs, and accreditation. His contention is that the ultimate success of global engage- ment will rest not only on programming but also on a shared understanding about and practice of partnerships and relationships.

We recommend that this Conference assure the [Inter- national Missionary] Council of our genuine interest in theological education in all lands; that we express our

conviction that the educational problems of any particular land must be met primarily from within that land; that we express our readiness to share in any possible and desired way in the meeting of these problems; and that we call attention to significant cooperative undertakings already carried out, such as the Deputation of the American Church History Society . . . the study of Christian educa- tion in India ... and the approaching study of theological education in China.1

... a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue,

1 ATS Bulletin 9, "Biennial Minutes, The Ninth Biennial Meeting of the Conference of Theological Seminaries and Colleges in the United States and Canada," June 12-13,1934, 15.

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parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.2

From "globalization" to "global awareness and engagement"3

Globalization, or what The Association of Theological Schools (ATS) Com- mission on Accrediting Standards currently calls "global awareness and engagement" (Commission Standard 3, section 3.3.4), has been a central concern of ATS at least since the 1990s, although one can argue that these concerns reach as far back as 1967, with the reflections of Harvey Cox on "world dialogue for theological education" in the journal Theological Education.4

The terminological move from "globalization" to "global aware- ness and engagement"—at least as a normative description of that part of the work of theological education that acknowledges that North American theological education is not (or ought not to be) the center of the theologi- cal education universe—was not made lightly, and marks a critical move within ATS. Those familiar with the dynamics of ATS as a membership organization know that by the time a normative statement is adopted (or revised) as part of its Standards of Accreditation, a long, somewhat complex, iterative process already would have been travelled by ATS

2 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-148.

3 Part of the reason, perhaps more implicit than explicit, for the Association's move from "globalization" to "global awareness and engagement" has to do with an acknowledgement of the need for a working definition of "globalization" that is (1) broader in reach, perhaps intentionally metaphoric; (2) more hospitable of the diversi- ties of global experiences, institutional priorities, and missional commitments of ATS member schools; and (3) more capable of accommodating and "holding together" both the legacies of tradition and innovation and continuities and changes of accredited graduate theological education in terms of its being decidedly normative, thoroughly performative, and intentionally formative.

4 Harvey Cox, "The Significance of the Church—World Dialogue for Theological Education," Theological Education 3, no. 2 (Winter 1967).

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member schools, including a formal two-thirds, "super majority" vote on the Standards of Accreditation themselves.

While there are multiple reasons for this terminological shift, one reading of the ATS conversations, perhaps the dominant one, is related to the pervasive skepticism about the appropriateness or adequacy of the term "globalization" (and its consequences for theological educa- tion) given its co-optation by (neoliberal) economic—even political (read "western hegemonic")—globalization to characterize the normative vision of ATS in this area of theological education. Another reading of this shift is tied to the recognition that there are multiple meanings and emphases of "globalization" among ATS member schools—often deeply contested, sometimes almost incommensurable—hence the need for "less ideo- logical," or polarizing signifiers that would allow for a more inclusive organizational embrace of diversity in this area of work. A third reading of this shift is rooted in assumptions about the nature of human reality and language itself where human experience, because of its densities, is not always amenable to or exhausted by what Paul Ricoeur called the "moment of explanation" within the larger interpretive framework of explanation, understanding, and appropriation that the nature of human reality demands because of these assumed densities.

There are rich traditions, perspectives, resources, and practices on globalization within the Association, the significance of some still waiting to be rediscovered, further developed, or critically revisited.5 Formal ATS

5 Even the most cursory review of the issues of Theological Education will reveal the depth and breadth of this tradition. See for example: volume 9, no. 4 (Summer 1973); volume 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1984); volume 22, no. 2 (Spring 1986); volume 26, supplement 1 (Spring 1990); volume 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1990); volume 27, no. 2 (Spring 1991); volume 29, no. 2 (Spring 1993); volume 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1993); volume 35, no. 2 (Spring 1999). Of direct relevance for this discussion, perhaps, are: ״Incarnating Globalization in ATS Schools: Issues, Experiences, Understandings, Challenge,״ volume 35, no. 2 (Spring ;(volume 26, supplement 1 (Spring 1990 ״Fundamental Issues in Globalization״ ;(1999 and ״Patterns of Globalization: Six Studies,״ volume 27, no. 2 (Spring 1991). One piece of historical trivia suggests how far back in the history of ATS globalization reaches: -At a meeting of the Continuation Committee, June 3,1919," the minutes of the Com״ mittee records, ״a subcommittee was appointed to procure data relating to theological schools, courses of study, conditions of admission, etc., in England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, and Flolland for the information of students of the United States and Canada who desire to continue their studies in the countries named ..." Conference of Theological Seminaries of the United States and Canada, Minutes of Continuation Committee, ATS Bulletin 2, December 1921.

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programming in the past ten years, at least, has not only built on these resources but has moved ATS discourse toward even more critical and ere- ative directions that have contributed to the deepening and broadening of diversity, mutuality, and equity—core values that have animated not only this long tradition of "global awareness and engagement" in accred- ited graduate theological education in general and within the Association itself, in particular, but also in the larger life and work of the Association's member schools.

Three historical developments are worth mentioning at the outset because they pose significant framing implications for the question of "global awareness and engagement": (1) the demographic shifts signaled by the cipher "2040," (2) the shifting "center" of Christianity from the Global North to the Global South, and (3) the rapid growth of immigrant churches in North America in the last 20 years. ATS has programmatically attended to the first development for some time now (e.g., through the programmatic work of its Committee on Race and Ethnicity). And while it has addressed the second two on occasion or indirectly (e.g., the racial/ ethnic, constituency-based conferences in the early 2000s), these areas remain largely unaddressed, leading some racial/ethnic constituencies who were involved in these events to note that "ATS has abandoned us." These three historical developments are not only raising even more clearly the question of "global awareness and engagement," but they also hold the possibility of decisively shaping the future of ATS itself.

For many ATS member schools, "global awareness and engagement" is framed largely, though not exclusively, by a concern about how best to understand the relationship—broadly conceived—between their particular locations as institutions in the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. Such awareness and engagement is built directly into the histories, missions, and ethos of their institutions—because of either the worldwide character of the ecclesial family to which they belong, their missionary or evangelistic orientations, or their geographical locations and the natures and compositions of their faculty and/or student bodies, and the commu- nities to which they declare both affinities and accountabilities.

More recent ATS surveys that are part of its Educational Models and Practices in Theological Education project strongly suggest a growing engagement of schools in transnational, transborder, and transcultural

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theological education.6 Many schools have collaborative degree programs with partner institutions in the "majority world" at the certificate, bacca- laureate, post-baccalaureate, and post-master's levels—some in extension education, distance-learning, or "global-consortiums" formats. Others have faculty exchanges involving short-term teaching and/or research. Still others have both credit- and noncredit-bearing intercultural and con- textual programs (e.g., travel seminars, immersion and contextualization programs, and "missionary" initiatives). Others also have partnerships with their historic communities of origin—whether global-global, global- south, or south-south.

Some schools have established centers directly related to global aware- ness and engagement (e.g., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School's Center for World Christianity and Global Theology, Ambrose Seminary's Jaffray Centre for Global Initiatives, and New York Theological Seminary's Center for World Christianity). Certain schools offer Spanish- or Mandarin- language courses, while others have Korean-language degree programs. Some ATS schools have extension sites in Germany, the Ukraine, Indone- sia, Guatemala, and Thailand.

While not always uniformly articulated, member schools—in addition to their missional and theological convictions regarding global aware- ness and engagement—have a wide range of rationales for their programs and initiatives. These include (1) a recognition that quality theological education in North America, including its relevance, must not only have an external "global reach" but must also integrate non-North American theological resources as constitutive of its North American identity; (2) a realization that sustainable quality education should be a globally shared enterprise whose survival is inextricably linked to this "global" reciproc- ity in the production and reproduction of theological knowledge, wisdom, and practice; (3) an affirmation that the educational purpose of a "good theological school" or "good theological education" is to prepare students to be "global citizens" who have the appropriate competencies, capad- ties, and sensibilities adequate to a fast-changing interdependent and globalizing world; and (4) a conviction that any theological education that

6 See Deborah H. C. Gin, "Four points to consider for international partnerships," Colloquy Online, February 2018, https://www.ats.edu/uploads/resources/publications־ presentations/colloquy-online/four־points־to־consider־for־intemational־partnerships. pdf.

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deserves to be called "good" must be able to embrace, if not navigate, the difficult but necessary intersectionalities of "the global" and "the local."

In the past five years, due in part to an increasing, if not re-awakened, interest in ATS outside North America, and also to the "globalization of theological education" in a shrinking world,7 ATS staff and other ATS- related individuals have been involved in transborder, transdisciplinary, transorganizational conversations, resource sharing, and cooperative pro- gramming with such international organizations as the Asia Theological Association (ATA), the Association for Theological Education in Southeast Asia (ATESEA), the Foundation for Theological Education in Southeast Asia (FTESEA), the International Council on Evangelical Theological Education (ICETE), the Lausanne Movement, the World Conference of Associations of Theological Institutions (WOCATI), and the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Theological Education (ETE).

These international organizations and others like them are important partners who rightly perceive that ATS may have much to offer them. In return, no doubt, individual ATS member schools as well as the Associa- tion as a whole, have much to learn from theological education outside North American boundaries. Recognizing this growing rediscovery of mutual, reciprocal need, the ATS Board of Directors began to revisit, at least since 2009, the idea and practice of "globalization," engaging in more structured conversations regarding the subject, first in terms of the notion of "ATS as a 'big' tent" and more recently in terms of the framework of "ATS and world Christianity."

Inside the "big tent" ecumenical beltway: institutional, organizational, and programmatic issues

Where the former is concerned, the working group convened by the ATS Board of Directors to explore the subject and review the practice of "big tent ecumenicity," after several meetings by conference call culminât- ing in its November 2012 board meeting, decided to pursue the notion

7 Dietrich Werner, David Esterline, Namsoon Kang, and Joshva Raja, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity: Theological Perpsectives, Ecumenical Trends, Regional Surveys (Oxford, England: Regnum Books International, 2010). World Con- ference of Associations of Theological Institutions, Challenges and Promises of Quality Assurance in Theological Education: Multicontextual and Ecumenical Inquiries (Fort Worth, Texas: WOCATI, 2013).

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of "big tent ecumenicity" largely within a programmatic rather than an administrative/organizational framework, where "big tent" meant the larger Jewish-Christian tradition. It was agreed that, while the Association may have reached a level of maturity that allows for robust conversa- tions on theological diversity among its membership, the administrative/ organizational conditions were not congenial at that time for pursuing the question of diversity across religious and multifaith lines. While some member schools understand their institutional identities in terms of an interreligious perspective (e.g., Claremont School of Theology, Harvard University Divinity School, University of Chicago Divinity School, Hart- ford Seminary, and Graduate Theological Union), most member schools continue to understand their missions within a North American Jewish- Christian perspective, notwithstanding their recognition of the importance of addressing interreligious and multifaith issues.8 World Christianity, rather than world religions, was affirmed as the primary organizing meta- phor for "big tent ecumenicity." That said, the question of interreligious, multifaith ecumenicity will not go away; and the conversation cannot be postponed indefinitely.

Thus, in its meetings during this period, the board agreed to more fully explore the implications of "world Christianity" for the future of ATS—of which focused reflection on the meaning and significance of transdisciplinary, transborder, and transorganizational perspectives and practices was a logical "next step." In fact, while racial/ethnic and gender diversity under the sign of multiculturalism had its own specific origins in ATS discourse apart from the discourse on "globalization," their co-con- stitutive character vis-à-vis global awareness and engagement has come to be recognized more fully so that the need to deal explicitly with the latter has come to the fore once again, this time within a multicultural, multireligious framework. These steps included an affirmation of the need to pursue more systematically at least two substantive and program- mafic questions: (1) What should ATS be doing with its member schools in

8 One way to read Dan Aleshire's "Community and Diversity" plenary address at the 2012 Minneapolis Biennial Meeting is as a cipher of the Association's readiness to explicitly address the fundamental importance of theological/ecclesial diversity, in addition to the more conventionally-accepted racial/ethnic, gender, and missional diversities long recognized by the Association, for the meaning of "big tent" ecu- menicity. See https://www.ats.edu/uploads/resources/publications-presentations/ documents/communi ty-and-diversity.pdf.

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terms of the question of ATS involvement outside North America? and (2) What should ATS be doing with its "partners" (e.g., ATESE A, ATA, ICETE, WOCATI, etc.) outside North America? The first question fixes its gaze internally; the second question gazes externally. Both are important to how ATS, as an organization, understands global awareness and engagement and are decisive not only to the programmatic direction that ATS should take but also, perhaps more importantly, to the future of ATS either as a binational organization that prefers to remain so, or as an organiza־ tion that seeks to engage the world globally in the service of accredited graduate theological education. Needless to say, a substantive bifurcation of these questions would be ill-advised; and a programmatic bifurcation would most probably prove to be perilously nearsighted.

In December 2013, the ATS Board of Directors adopted a framework statement to both authorize and guide future ATS work related to global awareness and engagement in six sufficiently discrete, though fundamen- tally interconnected, major areas: (1) understanding effective partnerships, (2) global engagement within North America, (3) cultivating scholarly and programmatic "trade routes," (4) contributing to a pan-Christian conver- sation on theological education, (5) educational and degree programs of study, and (6) continuing research and care. The statement also under- scored the guiding principle that current and future ATS involvement in programs with a "global reach" must include constituencies and publics that involve mainline, evangelical, and Roman Catholic/Orthodox indi- viduals and groups—a practice for which ATS is known in its work with member schools.9

As if to both pre-figure and embody this landmark framework state- ment, in the fall of 2012, a small group of individuals representing some of the ATS mainline member schools and international partners (ATESEA and WCC) met in Pittsburgh to discuss the present and future shape of theological education as well as the need for developing systematic and intentional partnerships beyond North America in the service of good theological education. Similarly, in late spring 2013, a small group of presidents and deans representing some of the ATS evangelical member

9 Guidelines on Global Awareness and Engagement from ATS Board of Directors, https://www.ats.edu/uploads/accrediting/documents/guidelines־on־global־aware־ ness־and־engagement־from־ats־board%20%282013%29.pdf, accessed October 15,2017.

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schools and organizations (e.g., the Overseas Council) met by conference call also to address the same questions that were discussed in the fall 2012 consultation of mainline schools. In January 2015, Roman Catholic rectors and presidents met to discuss similar issues in a consultation in Chicago, hosted by Catholic Theological Union. In June 2015 in Pittsburgh, ATS con- vened representatives of member schools engaged in global partnership programs of one kind or another to explore further the meaning and sig- nificance of those partnerships for theological education. Finally, in May 2016, ATS coordinated the first meeting of the Global Forum of Theological Educators (GFTE) in Dorfweil, Germany, gathering, possibly for the first time ever in one united forum, approximately 80 theological educators from 35 countries from six major church confessional families—Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Independent churches—to learn from one another and to share about the current situa־ tion of theological education and ministerial formation on a global scale in the context primarily of fellowship.10 Finally, ATS staff participated in the historic consultation of ICETE accreditation agencies in Rome in fall 2017, the purpose of which was to develop a structure and process "whereby common accreditation standards and benchmarks [can] be developed within the ICETE network among accreditation agencies in consultation with the church."11

In addition, for the ATS Educational Models and Practices in Theo־ logical Education (EMPTE) project, two working groups on "global partnerships" drawn from ATS member schools explored, among other things, not only what "global partnerships" might look like under the con- ditions of diversity, mutuality, and equity, but also how these partnerships

10 These meetings were made possible through existing ATS undesignated funds and a 2014 planning grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

11 ICETE,Rome Benchmarks,https://www.facebook.com/groups/1241553362592175/, accessed October 15, 2017.

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can be enacted where unevenness (political, economic, and administra- ti ve) is a dominant reality.12

These ATS staff-supported initiatives may be interpreted not only as a response to the ongoing commitments of ATS noted above but also as part of the goal of enlisting individuals and groups both within and without North America, assuming a framework of collaboration and shared wisdom, to help ATS as an organization to formally and substantively define its role "in the world." In this regard, the WOCATI example is illus- trative of an important institutional initiative in which ATS was involved. In the 1990s, with ATS support, accrediting agencies around the world were brought together for "fellowship, academic research, and mutual support."13 Unfortunately, for reasons larger than the limited support pro- vided by ATS, WOCATI was not able to build a sustainable institutional infrastructure on which the continuity of the organization needed to rest.

12 As part of the Educational Models and Practices in Theological Education Project, two focused groups on ״global partnerships," consisting of 12 schools, met to explore the different issues, questions, and challenges that cluster around the notion of "global partnerships." One group explored matters related to issues of reciprocity, spiritual formation (study abroad/immersion), and international accreditation. This group identified best practices for initiating, practicing, sustaining, and concluding global partnerships. The group identified a number of educational principles, including, but not limited to, excellence both institutional and educational, diversity and mutual- ity, experiential and group learning, interreligious faith dialogue, and integrity and accountability. The other group, identified crucial issues that, in their shared expe- rience, arise when considering, initiating, and sustaining global partnerships. This included faculty ownership of the globalization processes in their respective institu- fions, the need to establish coherence in articulating degrees offered in different global contexts, and the need to investigate the philosophical and theological mindset behind global partnerships. The group also identified challenges and opportunities in global partnerships, including issues of institutional and educational effectiveness, financial viability, and attentiveness to educational principles. See The ATS Educational Models and Practices in Theological Education Project, "Educational Models and Practices Peer Group Final Reports," https://www.ats.edu/uploads/resources/current-initia־ tives/educational-models/publications-and-presentations/peer-group-final-reports/ peer-group-final-report-book.pdf, accessed April 16, 2018.

13 "WOCATI's greatest service to American theological education," Glenn T. Miller writes, "may lie in the future. American religion, especially Mainstream Protestantism, is changing rapidly, and these changes may require substantial changes in how the United States educates its ministers . . . Just as America provided much of the world with the model of the graduate theological seminary, so the rest of the world may provide American Christians with fresh understandings and strategies of how to train their ministers." Glenn T. Miller, Piety and Plurality: Theological Education Since 1960 (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), 297.

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The WOCATI experience raised large strategic questions for ATS that presupposed even broader substantive, not to mention political, questions, including the following:

• If ATS were to be involved outside North America, what should that involvement look like: immersion? solidarity? missionary? contextual? dialogical? bilateral? multilateral?14 Who should be involved, and with whom?

• What are the dilemmas posed by such an involvement, and how may they best be addressed? For example, it seems clear that involvements at any of these levels (dependence, interdependence, independence) are welcomed by some and rejected by others? Put somewhat differ- ently, what are the consequences of such involvement?15

• If "being involved" or "being available" are appropriate stances, how does ATS structure institutionally such "availability" that avoids past mistakes, while rejecting the easy response of "non-involvement/ non-interference"? What would this "availability" cost in terms of per- sonnel, financial, and other resources?

These difficult questions notwithstanding, the experience of collabora- tion globally affirmed the "convening capacity" of ATS, based not only on its long history as a membership organization but also on the basis of its commitment to "big tent" inclusivity in terms of both its program and its accreditation functions. And while ATS may be more known intemation- ally for its expertise as an accrediting body, it has the capacity to convene and to extend the binational reach of its programs and services to a more multilateral, if not more global, level and to serve as yet another contribu- tion to the vitality of "world Christianity." For example, ATS programs

14 Some of the images of involvement shared by consultation participants included ATS as both ״host and guest" (hospitality), resource or broker, companion (accompani- ment), or dialogue partner.

15 For example, if the Commission were to extend its scope of accreditation to schools outside North America, as some regional accreditors have, this could create a tiered structure of theological education in other parts of the world based on some kind of "favored status" achieved by schools that would be recognized by the USDE by virtue of ATS accreditation. Members of the ATS Board of Directors have advised caution, as part of its commitment to an ethics of "global awareness and engagement," if ATS or the Commission were to move in this direction.

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for presidents, deans, CFOs, development officers, and student services personnel might be made available to interested institutions outside North America while also introducing a more "global" content (e.g., the consequences of the presence of visa students in ATS member schools for theological education in North America) to benefit North American theo- logical educators. ATS could also serve, as it has in the past, as a resource "broker" for its international partners, recommending or connecting individuals and organizations with ATS-related program or accreditation- related expertise.

Various consultation participants also acknowledged that many of the programs of ATS member schools—whether educational, denominational, or missional—already have some kind of global reach. And while there is no pressing need for ATS to provide a coordinating function, it could nonetheless serve as a clearing house or informational, cormectional portal for these programs. The ATS database, for example, could be utilized to organize information provided by member schools related to areas of international interest, and made more available or accessible to partners outside North America.16

Consultation participants also acknowledged that not only does the global reach of ATS need to be deeply attentive to the diversities of mission, theology, polity, and identity both within and without North America, but also that its global awareness and engagement needs to be disciplined by a commitment to mutuality, respect, and care. For example, attentiveness to the unevenness of resources and interpretation of "good theological edu- cation" could express itself programmatically in the principled sharing of accreditation expertise, but without extending ATS or Commission membership to non-US and Canadian schools. Or, such attentiveness to

16 Dan Aleshire's plenary address at the 2013 ATESEA General Assembly in Silang, Cavite, Philippines, as well as David Esterline's and Lester Edwin J. Ruiz's presen- tâtions at the 2011 WOCATI meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, are illustrative of this transborder information sharing. The point, of course, is, how can ATS make this valuable information and insight more readily available or accessible in ways that affirm both the importance of "high touch" engagement and the need for more sustainable, more efficient, and less labor-intensive methods of dissemination? See Namsoon Kang, John Gichimu, et al., Challenges and Promises of Quality Assurance in Theological Education: Multicontextual and Ecumenical Inquiries, https://www.oikoumene. org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/education-and־ecumenical־formation/ ete/wocati/challenges-and-promises-of-quality-assurance-in-theological-education, accessed October 15, 2017.

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the importance of mutuality, respect, and care could be expressed by ATS opening its North American programs to interested theological institu- tions outside North America while ensuring that its modes of delivery do not violate the ecologies of "local" theological education—including the rights of theological "self-determination." It could also convene presidents of ATS member schools together with the presidents of theological schools from outside North America to discuss what partnership in a global context might mean. In this context, it is clear that ATS programming and engage- ment understands the constitutive necessity for diversity and mutuality, as well as the programmatic implications of equity.

Broader dilemmas, challenges, and perspectives: the runways of global awareness and engagement

One might wish that the Global Awareness and Engagement initiative was only about program, planning, and policy. Happily, it is not. A number of broader issues require attention, even as they exemplify the challenges that theological education has always faced.

First, there are definitional and substantive challenges including, for example, (1) how globalization and theological education are to be understood and linked, given the contested and uneven experiences of globalization arising out of different, if asymmetrical, institutional and educational resources, priorities, preferences, and commitments, as well as the fact that (western or "north Atlantic") globalization in its multiple expressions has both constructive and destructive effects on life more gen- erally or that it is only one among many "globalizations" alongside, for example, Chinese, Islamic, etc.; (2) what constitutes an adequate theology and ministry for a globalizing world, particularly in relation to historic faith and practice; and (3) how "effective global partnerships" should be defined and by what measures and criteria they should be assessed.

Second, there are political and institutional push-and-pull challenges, including (1) "brain drain" (for the Global South) vis-à-vis "brain gain" (for the Global North); (2) the need to develop self-reliant, self-sufficient, indigenous leadership vis-à-vis mission-driven commitments for resource sharing in a world of declining resources; (3) strong denominational missionary commitments vis-à-vis a recognition of the need for the affir- mation of the non-Christian "Other"; (4) the perception of North American power and privilege and their accompanying agenda-setting prerogatives

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vis-a-vis the ethical and moral imperative for hospitality and mutual accountability in an asymmetrical world; and (5) the singular though not exclusive accountability of North American theological education vis-à-vis the rest of theological education elsewhere in the world.

Third, there are educational and pedagogical challenges including (1) the perceived, if often assumed, normativity of English in terms of learning, teaching, and research; (2) the very real differences between and among cultures leading to different understandings of theology and pedagogy, for example, the differences between oral and reading/writing cultures, of rote and constructivist learning, and of egalitarian and authori- tarian pedagogies; and (3) the growth of new delivery systems and models of education and mission (including distance/online, extension, and com- petency-based education), which are based on infrastructural asymmetries in technology and resources, as well as the dominance of an academic and curricular structure and culture that tend to privilege the Global North at the expense of the Global South.

Fourth, there are programmatic challenges related to educational ini- tiatives—whether degree-granting or not—among ATS member schools, for example, that have international extension sites raising questions about (1) the viability, sustainability, and desirability of such programs, the roles of partner institutions in the implementation of these programs, and the effects of North American-run programs on the ecology of theo- logical education in the Global South and (2) the role of North American educational institutions, including theological ones, in the credentialing needs and desires of individuals and institutions outside North America, for example, direct accreditation or assistance in the development, imple- mentation, or improvement of their own practices of accreditation.

Effective partnerships: The religio-moral dimension of global awareness and engagement These challenges are illustrative of the complexity of global awareness and engagement, and instructive for understanding the deeper, perhaps less visible, religio-moral character of global awareness and engagement. By definition, the religio-moral is fundamentally about "what we can and need to do together"17 in the light of what Plato called "the good, the true,

17 Manfred Halpem, Transforming the Personal, Political, Historical and Sacred in Theory and Practice, ed. David Abalos (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2009).

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and the beautiful." What is notable about the work of both ATS member schools and the Association's own initiatives—at least in my own reading of the situation—is the religio-moral assumptions they share. Both are based on a belief that global awareness and engagement are fundamen- tally about the practice of "effective partnerships": those institutional and educational practices that are animated by normative expectations of mutu- ality and collegiality, shared responsibility, accountability, transparency, and decision making between and among the partners at whatever level or kind; that have clearly agreed upon purposes that empower and transform those in the partnerships; and that are contextualized, sustainable, useful, and attainable. In short, effective partnerships are an inherently norma- tive, value-explicit human activity.

Effective partnerships further illustrate the religio-moral, especially when they include those practices that emphasize the desirability of mul- tilateral, multilayered, and multiperspectival strategies and voices that (1) seriously attend to the intersectionality of the issues related to global awareness and engagement, including issues around the dialogical, ecu- menical, evangelistic, and justice efforts of faith-based communities including churches; (2) broaden and deepen collaborations, particularly in terms of inclusion, plurality, and difference; and (3) are intentionally sensitive to the nuances and specificities of asymmetrical space, time, and place. The religio-moral is articulated even more fully in those initiatives that encourage interdependence and relative autonomy in Global North- South relationships, that empower those involved in the partnership, and that flatten power differentials that arise out of the unevenness of human, financial, and physical resources as well as history and location. A more intentional multidirectional flow of resources between the Global North and the Global South, where the notion of resources is redefined in more comprehensive terms than just human, financial, or physical, is illustrative.

Effective partnering as religio-moral practice also includes the forma- tion of a spirituality, where formation is understood as being constituted

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by "wholeness, purpose, and community,"18 that is articulated in (1) the enhancement and improvement of individual and institutional capad־ ties and skillsets for cross-cultural, contextual, and inter- and multifaith competencies for institutional and educational innovation and change; (2) the knowledge and sensitivity to and respect for economic, cultural, and religious differences that shape theological education and practice worldwide; (3) the development and nurture of shared ideals, values, and principles among and between the partnering individuals and institutions; (4) the constitutive and regulative practices of active, empathie, principled, and humble listening, as well as translation and appropriation; and (5) the sobering "fact" that partnerships take a long time to develop and require trust for their full flowering. The importance of such a spirituality cannot be underestimated because our generation is heir to an insidious, subter- ranean spirit of indifference not only to others but to the excluded Others that, if left unchecked, will compromise the possibility of any kind of part- nership—if it has not done so already.

In the end, global awareness and engagement cannot be under- stood apart from the kind of personal, professional, and institutional

18 Stanton Wortham deploys the phrase, "formative education." See "Educat- ing whole human beings," http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/wholechild/ Stanton-Wortham-2017-WCWP.pdf, accessed April 16, 2018. Put somewhat differ- ently, following the pathway charted by Jacques Derrida, one could argue that "global awareness and engagement" is about a sustained meditation on what "togetherness" means—both in terms of "death" or alterity (part of what "the religious" means) and "togetherness" (what this essay calls "global awareness and engagement" and/ or "global partnerships." The former is explored in Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans., Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York, NY: Melville Publications, 2007); the latter in a lecture titled Vivre 'ensemble'—Living 'together/ delivered at the international conference on "Irreconcilable Differences? Jacques Derrida and the Question of Religion," University of California, Santa Barbara, October 23-25, 2003, where he explores the entanglements of living together as an obvious inevitability, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as a promise (and despair) occasioned by proximity and distance, identity and difference, and violence and forgiveness—themes explored in this essay as integral parts of global awareness and engagement as being-in-the-world. What is both salutary and illustrative, however, is Derrida's unequivocal commitment to the practice of engagement, particularly with representatives of the historic Others. See, for example, his conversation with Musta- pha Cherif in Mustapha Cherif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Religion and Postmodernism), trans., Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Indeed, my largest debt to Derrida may lie both in the funda- mental assertion of the necessity to explore practically and theoretically what "living together" means—which this essay has called, "global awareness and engagement."

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partnerships that characterize such awareness and engagement; in fact, effective partnerships constitute the meaning, significance, and definition of global awareness and engagement itself. Moreover, such partnerships are fundamentally performative. They come into being as they are lived out and have no meaning apart from this enactment.

Therefore, any understanding of global awareness and engagement and the partnerships that constitute it must be linked to some understand- ing of the nature of actual human bodies and the "body politic"—as ethnos, demos, and bios—as these are the embodied sites of meaning, performativ- ity, and spirituality. This essay now turns to these themes.

Bodies, the "body politic," and Mondialisation: ATS belt- ways and runways rerouted—a socio-philosophical sight line

Globalization, Mondialisation, biopolitics In the English-speaking world, globalization has come to be assumed not only as the horizon (i.e., a range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular situation, location, or vantage point) but also as the way in which totality is grasped as an (intentional) amorphous, undif- ferentiated whole and as a spatial and temporal extension of a particular [Euro-American] way of life. The more conventional critique of globaliza- tion is that it is not only a limited horizon granted universal status but also that it has led us down a pathway that destroys other ways of life that stand in the way of its geopolitical, geostrategic, and geocultural exten- sions [e.g., colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, cultural chauvinism, and, more recently, extractivism]. Moreover, globalization as we have inher- ited it is almost always accompanied, particularly in the Global North, by a fundamental subterranean epistemological temptation to represent the world as an act of a self-sufficient, autonomous, "subject of history."19 Such representation bears resemblances to a Cartesian-like aspiration for that philosophical, perspectival, and foundational certitude that grounds all modem thinking, feeling, and acting, as well as a Hobbesian-Lockean- like anthropology of a possessive and extractive individual that is also an

19 Martin Heidegger, "The Age of World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technol- ogy and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115-154.

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epistemological or thinking-knowing subject with the power, privilege, and opportunity to name or represent, and therefore, to create, the world in his image: Cogito ergo sum becomes Cogito ergo vinco, and eventuates in Vinco ergo sum.20 The biblical tradition calls this idolatry.

However, globalization is not the only term or meaning of world that is available to us. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that "world" in the French language does not always carry with it the connotations of world as "globalization." Nancy foregrounds Mondialisation as that process of differentiation and formation that "maintains a crucial reference to the world's horizon as a space of human relations ... of meaning held in common ... of signification or possible signification."21 In fact, Mondialisa- tion, unlike its Anglophone counterpart globalization, places the emphasis not on the representation of the world but on the creative act of forming a world. And while it is not clear to me that Nancy fully extricates himself from the representational, apophantic dilemma of globalization conven- tionally understood, the notion of Mondialisation and its implicit relational, dialogical, and personal sensibilities offers a possible clearing in the dark forest of globalization—a place of relational, intersubjective, and bodily disclosure the ancient Greeks called αλήθεια—in our conversations about global awareness and engagement.22

In this context, my insistence on understanding "partnerships" in terms of reference to the body and the "body politic" (as ethnos, demos, bios), which in this essay is another name for "communities of faith, learning, and accountability," is decidedly empirical; I deploy the term to signify, quite literally, material, concrete, sensuous human bodies not only as a way to ground and orient my understanding of global awareness and engagement but also as a way to resist the objectification, reifica- tion, and commodification of human beings and nature arising out of the

20 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Enrique Dussel, History and the Theology of Liberation: A Latin American Perspective, trans. J. Drury (New York: Orbis Books, 1976).

21 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York, 2007), 33-55.

22 In his work, Besinnung (Gesamtausgabe 67), Martin Heidegger lists nine texts where he examines the question of truth. See Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006). One could make a persuasive argument that the "question of truth" as disclosure has huge implications for the present state of affairs, at least in the US context.

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estrangement [Entfremdung] intrinsic to the dynamics of capitalism's rela- tions of production, reproduction, extraction, and representation.231 also deploy the term philosophically and metaphorically to signify my affini־ ties with what Michel Foucault and those who have followed his lead have called "biopolitics."24

The labyrinthine discourses on biopolitics need not detain us here. It is sufficient to say that they remind us of the necessary role, status, and function of "the body" whether construed literally, metaphorically, or biopolitically in discussions of religion, politics, or ministry today, par- ticularly, where "bare life" itself has become a site of both disciplinary power and "dispositifs of control."25 We need only recall that under the sign of capitalism and sovereignty today, the practical and conceptual divide between the οίκος and the πόλις, or what the ancient Greeks saw as a dis- tinction between "natural life" [zoe] and "political life" [bios], can only be sustained with great difficulty. The collapse of the distinction, as Antonio Negri points out, results in the "control of populations as a way to govern life" [itself].26 Life today—and therefore ministry—cannot be extricated from its multistranded embodiments or from multiple bodies across time, space, and place. The good life can no longer be recuperated by upholding the distinction between zoe and bios, since the collapse of the distinction, under conditions of the exercise and circulation of power of globalizing, transnationalizing capitalist regimes, has profoundly altered religious and public life through discipline, punishment, and [dispositifs] of control. This is evident, for example, in the dynamics of forced migration so starkly

23 Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988); Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

24 Michel Foucault, ׳The Birth of Biopolitics/' in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 73-79; Roberto Esposito, Bios: Bio- politics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

25 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2-3; Michel Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," in Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194-228.

26 Antonio Negri, "The Labor of the Multitude and the Fabric of Biopolitics," trans. Sara Mayo, Peter Graefe and Mark Coté, Mediations 23, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 8-25.

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demonstrated recently in Europe or "gentrification" in such areas as downtown Detroit or Harlem; or the framing of "the good, the true, and the beautiful" by Silicon Valley, Bollywood, Wall Street, and the fashion runways of Tokyo, Paris, Milan, and New York; or the proliferation of mul- tiple iterations of technology (from the technical to the perspectival) and their multiple applications in realms of the political, the economic, the cul- tural, and the educational.

A dispersed, displaced, and dislocated (and therefore mobile) body I have long argued that the "body politic," including those communities engaged in accredited graduate theological education, is shaped by, or more precisely, embedded in, a number of intersecting, but contingent, mobile, and polymorphic conditions: one, it is dispersed, displaced, and dislocated; two, it is racialized and ethnicized; and three, it is gendered and sexualized.27

I have also argued that the transformative dimensions of these inter־ secting conditions, which go by many names, including, for example, mobility, hybridity, innovation, and improvisation, are compromised by the fact that significant numbers of the "body politic" have been either dis- embodied (i.e., expunged from that very body: dismembered, incarcerated,

27 Dietrich Wemer, David Esterline, Namsoon Kang, and Joshva Raja, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity: Theological Perspectives, Ecumenical Trends, Regional Surveys (Oxford: Regnum Books, International, 2010). See, for example, Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, "Recovering the Body: When Race and Power Migrate," 85-103; Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, "Race, Power, and Migration: Reimagining Graduate Theological Edu- cation," in Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology, eds. Elaine Padilla and Peter Phan (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 211-231; Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, "I believe in the res- urrection of the body—meditations and explorations on ׳the religious/ ׳the public/ and the Asian diaspora: a research framework and agenda," in Asian Christian Review, (Summer 2013): 63-111.

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disabled, pathologized, commodified, criminalized, or securitized)28 and erased and forgotten, not only by modern politics but also by institutions of the "body politic" itself, including by the government, the military, the university, the church, and the clinic.29

28 This assertion of these "disembodiments" requires a more complex argument that a short essay cannot sustain. Because I have made this argument elsewhere, it is sufficient to suggest here that a fulsome understanding of global awareness and engagement, even in graduate theological education, will need to attend to the new geopolitics experienced by many today as being more unapologetically predatory, even more widespread, almost proto-fascist, and undeniably xenophobic. The reali- ties of "forced migration," globally, and of "immigration," in the US context that have exploded on the world stage in the past few years (e.g., the "refugee crisis" in Europe, the US debate on immigration in the United States, and even more poignantly, the forced migration of communities resulting from "natural" disasters—Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas, California)—particularly the responses to certain sectors of the body politic—reveal a profound reliance on a geopolitical understanding that is state-centric, juridically-bounded, administratively implemented, and an intentionally exclusionary aggregate of competing interests. It is a spatial and temporal extension of a partie- ular North Atlantic way of life, articulated in terms of structures and processes that privilege sovereign states and their bureaucratic apparatuses as the legitimate form of planetary life. Those who are "strangers" (or Others) to these structures and processes, or who do not conform or comply, are treated as criminals or as "security risks" — hence the phrase "bodies that are criminalized, incarcerated, and securitized," or are excluded or minoritized because of disability or pathology. This is not new, of course, but the point directly relevant to this essay is not only that these crises are ethical prob- lems requiring a response, but rather that this understanding of geopolitics that has come to be assumed not only as the horizon (i.e., a range of vision and its accompa- nying practices that includes everything that can be seen from a particular situation, location or vantage point), but also as the way in which totality is grasped, making it both an ontological and epistemological matter to be addressed. See Lester Edwin }. Ruiz, "Conversations with Migrant Advocates: Do we believe in the resurrection of the body?" in The Intersections of Migration, Human Rights, and Development Justice, Liberato Bautista and Mervin Toquero, eds. (New York and Quezon City: NCCP & GBCS UMC, 2014), 81-106; Lester Edwin J Ruiz, "Afterword: CWWM's Journey From New York to Berlin—Finding Our Way Home," in Turning Strangers into Friends: Hospitality, Mercy, Justice, Liberato C. Bautista, ed. (Quezon City: National Council of Churches in the Philippines, 2017), 65-76.

29 Saskia Sassen calls this "expulsions" in her book, Expulsions: Brutality and Com- plexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014). See also Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2015); Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Nancy Leong, "Racial Capital- ism," Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (June 2013): 2,151-2,226. See, more generally, Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" in https://web. stanford.edu/~davies/Symbsysl00-Spring0708/Marx-Commodity-Fetishism.pdf, accessed December 22, 2017. See also, for example, https://boxedambivalence.word- press.eom/2008/06/08/ql-commodification-of-the-female-body/, accessed December 22, 2017.

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Four things can be said concerning the first condition. First, the disper- sal, displacement, and dislocation of bodies cannot be explained by any one theory, although one of the suggestive metaphors for the changes that are occurring worldwide has been that of turbulence, suggesting by its use not mere motion, activity, or movement, but disruptive, unpredict- able, volatile speed.30 Second, there is a compelling argument to be made that these changes are, in fact, part of what Anthony Giddens called "the consequences of modernity," including (1) the separation and emptying of time and space, (2) the development of disembedding mechanisms like symbolic tokens and expert systems, and (3) the reflexive appropriation of knowledge.31 Third, these conditions are not only structured and sustained by the movements and flows of capital, people, goods, information, ideas, and images; they are, in fact, socially constructed by the very actions and/ or activities of those individuals and communities that have been globally dispersed, displaced, and dislocated. And, fourth, these dispersals, dis- placements, and dislocations—while creating conditions of estrangement, marginalization, antagonism, exclusion, even disintegration and anomie, and what Zygmunt Bauman calls the "endemic uncertainty of liquid modernity"32—have also given rise to languages and experiences of multi- plicity, plurality, and difference as well as hybridity, intersectionality, and liminality, and therefore to the possibilities of transformation, innovation, and improvisation in political, economic, cultural, and religious life.

A racialized and ethnicized body Two things may be said concerning the second condition. First, follow- ing the work of the "critical race theorists," it is important not to yield to the temptation of the "uncritical use of biological and essential concep- tions of race as premises of antiracist struggles," and to acknowledge that "the term 'race' may be so historically and socially overdetermined that it

30 Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 3-21.

31 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 16-50.

32 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 4-26.

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is beyond rehabilitation."33 At the same time, following Ronald Takaki, it may be important to assert that racial experience is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from ethnic experience and, therefore, to be careful not to reduce "race" to "ethnicity" or "cultural identity."34 An undiffer־ entiated view fails to account for the centrality of race in the histories of oppressed groups and therefore underestimates the degree to which tradi- tional notions of race have shaped, and continue to shape, the societies in which we live, including through the decisive, far reaching area of law.35

Second, drawing on the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant— which deploys the term "racialization" to signify "the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group," thereby underscoring the "contingent and changing nature of race and racism while recognizing its pervasive and systematic effect on our history"36—we can argue that there can be no homogenous or unitary notion of race and that its meaning, of necessity, will not only arise out of its multistranded contexts but also will have multiple accounts: biological, social, cultural, essential, strategic, and political. With Chong־Soon Lee we might conclude not only that "race as ethnicity may actually hinder our ability to resist entrenched forms of racism" but that race as a creature irreducible to ethnicity is needed in order to understand that colonialism, say in Africa, as an expression of imperialism, is both about racial domina- tion and ethno-cultural oppression.37 It may be, as well, that the notion of (white) privilege or (white) supremacy globally construed may be a more productive framework for addressing this form of oppression, especially in order to move the discourse beyond the "white/black" racial binary. Such a construal of race also provides opportunities to discover how the

33 Jayne Chong-Soon Lee, "Navigating the Topology of Race," in Critical Race Theory, eds. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 441.

34 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, rev. ed. (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008).

35 Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Race Liberalism and the Deradicalization of Racial Reform," Harvard Law Review 130, no. 9 (October 2017): 2,298-2,319. See also Nancy Leong, "Racial Capitalism," note 28.

36 Michael Omni and Howard A. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 68.

37 Chong-Soon Lee, "Navigating the Topology of Race," 442.

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different ways one's racialized and ethnicized contexts and origins are constitutive of transformative theological education.

A gendered and sexualized body Concerning the third condition, I have argued that much can be learned about the body and the "body politic" from the struggles of feminist, womanist, and Mujerista, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersexed [LGBTQI] members of the "body politic," not only to regain control of their bodies, but also to recuperate the places of their bodies in religious and public life.

In the first place, these struggles to recover the place of the body in religious and public life involve different ways of producing, reproducing, and valuing (different) knowledges (epistemologies), consistently focused on the necessity of rethinking the relationship between reason and desire and the construction of conceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relationship between them. In the second place, these struggles to recover the place of the body in religious and public life involve different modes of being (ontologies), insisting not only that thinking, feeling, and acting are relational practices but also that bodies—more than passive, sexualized biological objects—can be refig- ured and reinscribed. In the third place, these struggles to recover the place of the body in religious and public life involve different forms of consciousness (subjectivitities), not only acknowledging that conscious- ness arises out of concrete and sensuous activity but also that subjectivity itself is performative and that spirituality is always and already ecologi- cally-embedded and embodied experience, including different practices of touching, feeling, smelling, tasting, eating, imagining, and making love. In the fourth place, these struggles to recover the place of the body in reli- gious and public life involve different empowering practices (politics), recognizing not only the importance of self-definition, self-valuation, self- reliance, and self-determination but also the necessity of transformation, transgression, and resistance, and of finding shared safe places and clear voices in the midst of difference—particularly where the asymmetries of power are mediated through structures and processes that legitimize or naturalize some differences and not others.

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A spirituality of global engagement: the religio-moral as being-in-the-world

Avta Brah and Ann Phoenix, in a 2004 essay titled, 'Ain't I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality," demonstrate through the use of autobiog- raphy and empirical studies that "social class [and its intersections with gender and 'race' or sexuality] are simultaneously subjective, structural, and about social positioning and everyday practices." Especially intriguing is the conclusion to the essay that invites reflection on the "potential con- tributions to intersectional analysis of theoretical and political approaches such as those associated with poststructuralism, postcolonial feminist analysis, and diaspora studies."38

Intersectionality directs our gaze to at least three important reli- gio-moral questions: the nature of the social totality, the character of subjectivity, and the challenge of practice, this time articulated as the ques- tion of "effective partnerships." But why are they important?

First, the importance of attending to the nature of the social totality underscores the importance of embodied connections of space, time, and place. Richard Thompson Ford argued, for example, that racial segregation in the United States is created and perpetuated by racially identified space and that the latter "results from public policy and legal sanctions . . . ,"39 which, I will add, are played out—articulated, represented, implicated— on the actual bodies of human beings. In a different though not unrelated context, Foucault may be interpreted as underscoring the rearticulation of the social totality when he observes that "a whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms are in the plural)—from the great strategies of geopoli- tics to the little tactics of the habitat... passing via economic and political

38 Avta Brah and Ann Phoenix, "Ain't I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality" Journal of International Women's Studies 5, no. 3 (2004): 75-86; Avta Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17-83. See also, Giorgio Agamben's notion of "apparatus" in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2-3. See also, Michel Foucault's dispositif in "The Confession of the Flesh," 194-228.

39 Richard Thompson Ford, "The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis," Critical Race Theory, note 32, 449-465.

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installations"40—not only from the Global North to the Global South, but also within the Global South.

Second, where subjectivity is concerned, the recognition of actual bodies as multiple, multistranded, and multifaceted performative sites fundamentally challenges all ahistorical, essentialist, nonrelational, and reified construals of "the Subject" and directs us not only to the ques- tion "What is to be done?" but also to the questions of identity: "who we are, what we hope for, where we are going, how do we get there?" This "reinstalls" the notion of subjectivity within a much deeper, broader, inter- sectional, relational, ecological, and performative whole. My insistence on situating "the Subject" in these ways is an attempt to side-step the long and destructive shadow cast by the anthropocentric, auto-referential, phil- osophical, epistemic, and political Sovereign of that part of Euro-American life associated with "modernity" or "the Enlightenment." In this context, race, gender, sexuality, and security are not only the extensions or effects of human action; they are also entanglements of structure, process, agency, ecology, and thought.

Third, where the performative and therefore challenge of practice is concerned, such bodies direct us to the intersections of a peoples' plural- istic and are therefore always and already contradictory, antagonistic and agonistic economic, cultural, political, and religious histories—there not only to be reminded of the importance of context for ministry but also to be directed toward the religio-moral as "practical-critical activity.41 The challenge is not only to link theory and praxis, thought and action, spirit and matter, but also "to grasp the root of the matter . . . man [sic] himself [sic]"—as sensuous human activity, (i.e., practice [performance]).To put the matter boldly, global awareness and engagement as the practice of effective partnerships is concrete, sensuous, human activity.

40 Michel Foucault, "The Eye of Power," Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 146-149.

41 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. W. Lough (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 13-15; Karl Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law," Deutsch Französische Jahrbücher (1844), http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/l843/critique-hpr/intro.htm, accessed October 15, 2017.

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Conclusion: the futures of global awareness and engage־ ment—the heart of the matter

Focusing on the metaphor of "the body" as sensuous human activity brings the conversation both of global awareness and engagement and the religio-moral imperative of "effective partnerships" into the domain of the categorically personal, not only in the sense that it touches our lives (the phrase in ATS־style accreditation is "high touch") but also that we bear simultaneous unconditional responsibility for the good, the true, and the beautiful, as well as the bad, the false, and the ugly ( i.e., we own but do not control them). It also allows us to shine light (Heidegger's image of light and clearing in the Schwarize Wald of Baden-Württemberg) on the practices of accredited graduate theological education—which arguably is a necessary but much larger task than is possible in this brief essay. My more modest goal in this essay has been to suggest some reasons for the need to reframe the conversation on global awareness and engagement by bringing it more fully into the realm of everyday personal practice as effec- tive partnership without separating the conversation from its ontological and epistemological connections. However, one more caveat needs to be stated—namely, while the personal may be necessary, it is not a sufficient condition of possibility for effective partnerships.

"Three things remain," Saint Paul reminds us: "faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13). In fact, theologically put, at the heart of the religio-moral is the ineffable, irrepressible, exces- sive, and unconditional love of God. Without this love—given to us in its contingency, impurity, and at great cost in the life, death, and resur- rection of Jesus, and through the communities of faithful struggle both named and unnamed throughout history—the religio-moral would be an empty shell; global awareness and engagement would be less meaning- ful; ministry would only limp along. Love itself is performative as it is fundamental; it is constitutive as it is transformative. And while we essen- tialize and romanticize it only at our own peril, with some certainty we can say that existentially, without love, there can be no passion or com- passion, no unconditional forgiveness, no vulnerability, and no genuine humility. Love makes courage, resistance, and struggle bearable; it makes diakonia necessary and it makes mutual respect, decency, and recognition of difference obligatory. Separated from love, empowerment, integrity, and righteousness would be mere dogma; there would be very little

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tenderness, or kindness, or enduring joy. Love invites curiosity, wonder- ment, and awe. It contextualizes goodness, truth, and beauty. It sustains justice, modulates power, and nourishes transformation.

The "heart of the matter" is that global awareness and engagement, theologically and existentially comprehended, are about effective, loving, embodied partnerships that—in the context of ATS—are foregrounded as a "big tent ecumenicity" that includes theological/ecclesial diversity, in addition to the more conventionally-accepted racial/ethnic, gender, and missional diversities long recognized by the Association and the Commission. And where these reach to "the global," they must include constituencies and publics that involve individuals and groups from the historic Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Independent Churches (e.g., in Africa and China)—a practice for which ATS is known not only in its work among its member schools but also in its involvements with "partners" outside the United States and Canada. The diverse gifts and virtues that these communities of faith bring to the table, when taken together and bound by love, inspire what ATS calls the "improvement and enhancement of [both] theological schools [and theological education] to the benefit of communities of faith and the broader public."42

Strategically, I want to suggest that the future, if not relevance, of ATS as a "North American" institution implicated in the realities of "global Christianity" rests on its capacity to institutionally embody "global aware- ness and engagement" with global sensibilities as an intentional horizon, a sixty-thousand-foot sightline, if you will, for its work. Programmatically, I want to suggest, that the future of global awareness and engagement, in the ATS context, is exemplified in the kind of work of the Global Forum

42 ATS Mission Statement, https://www.ats.edu/about, accessed October 15, 2017. Where diversity and inclusion are concerned, the truism was, even without theological or ecclesial orthodoxy, in the past ATS was held together by an educational orthodoxy (e.g., the MDiv, residential education, and graduate-level theological education), and that now, without an educational orthodoxy, the challenge is to find that which will hold the organization together. My own sense now is that despite all the diversity that can divide, all our member schools actually cannot disagree that our God is a gracious God—and when this graciousness is embodied in ATS practice, all the diversities can be "parked" in the presence of such grace, thereby allowing member schools to "live well together finally." How this grace looks institutionally, I believe, remains the chai- lenge for the future.

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of Theological Educators—a relatively new initiative that ATS has helped birth as part of its previously noted Global Awareness and Engagement initiative.

Designed to provide an opportunity for leaders in theological educa- tion from every Christian tradition to meet and learn from those doing similar work but whose faith tradition might be different from their own, the purpose of GFTE was to establish a common platform for theologi- cal educators to share experiences and explore commitments and areas for potential collaboration. The role of ATS in the development of GFTE has been significant, primarily due to ATS' reputation as inclusive and not privileging one group or ecclesial family over another. As a primary objective of GFTE is to develop trust among theological educators across the long-established boundaries, ATS' commitment to maintaining a "big tent" in which everyone is welcome and no particular agenda is allowed to take precedence over others has been particularly important. As described in the final report of the meeting, "People talked across boundaries—both ecclesial and geographical—that many participants had not crossed pre- viously. Perhaps more importantly, people listened to commitments of persons from Christian families that they had not heard before."

I wish to conclude this essay by noting, yet again, what lies at the core of both the initiative and the Forum—and which Daniel Aleshire, during his term as executive director of ATS, had the ecumenical wisdom and grace to see and from which he had the courage and humility to insist on our learning from again and yet again. To put the matter boldly, it was his practical insistence on "big tent ecumenicity" in the context of the chai- lenges of world Christianity and the call for transformation in accredited graduate theological education that are his gift and legacy, as well as the hope of many.43

43 See Daniel Aleshire, ״The Future has Arrived: Changing theological education in a changed world," Theological Education 46, no. 2 (2011): 69-80, where he signals the need, perhaps, even the necessity, of continuity and change, conflict and collabora- tion, and the recreation of accredited graduate theological education in light of the fundamental importance of theological/ecclesial diversity, in addition to the more con- ventionally-accepted racial/ethnic, gender, and missional diversities long recognized by the Association. See also, Daniel Aleshire, "Diversity in Theological Education and Ecumenical Engagement: Diversity among the Theological Schools of North America," in Theological Education and Theology of Life, eds. Atóla Longkumer, Po Ho Huang, and Uta Andree (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2016), 208-217.

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Of Beltways, Runways, and Sight Lines

Excerpts from "The Concluding message of the Global Forum of Theological Educators (GFTE)" are instructive as they are prophetic and summative for future work:

. . . The GFTE's composition is unique . . . key theologi- cal educators from the six major church confessional families—Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Evan- gelical, Pentecostal, and Independent churches—gathered together in one united forum in order to learn from one another and to share about the current situation of theo- logical education and ministerial formation on a global scale ... to underline the common tasks that face all Chris- tian traditions. Some of these tasks include: building up new leadership for the mission of the church, strengthen- ing the sense of unity among Christians, giving witness to justice with peace in the world, and supporting all aspects of theological education. The meeting was characterized by a deep sense of humility and of mutual openness in prayer and dialogue ...

... In our many contexts, we realize again that unity and cooperation in theological education beyond the tradi- tional divides are not a luxury or mere specialized vocation for some, but are essential to the future of theological edu- cation. Cooperation and dialogue in theological formation are required for the majority of settings where the church finds itself in the twenty-first century ...

. . . We are aware that we can complement one another and need one another with the different gifts we bring to the common table in the area of theological education. The need to overcome stereotypes and caricatures of one another is crucial not just for theological education but also for our witness in a world that is tom apart by wars, violence, and so many types of injustice. We have been made aware of the need to continue conversations started in this first gathering, to foster friendships and collabora- tion birthed from our dialogue, and to seek together, as

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educators, to work toward transformative theological edu- cation that serves the churches and God's kingdom.44

Lester Edwin J. Ruiz is Senior Director of Accreditation and Institutional Evalua- tion at The Association of Theological Schools in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

44 Global Forum of Theological Educators, "Concluding Statement." http://www. ataasia.com/concluding-message-of-the-global-forum-of-theological-educators-gfte/, accessed April 16, 2018. See also http://gfte.org, accessed May Î, 2018.

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