Introduction

The first century of educating clergy in the United States is rightly understood as classical professional education—that is, as formation into an identity and calling to serve the wider public through specialized knowledge and skills. This book argues that pastors, priests, and rabbis were best formed into capacities of culture building through the construction of narratives, symbols, and practices that served their religious communities and the wider public. This kind of education was closely aligned with liberal arts pedagogies of studying classical texts, languages, and rhetoric in order to form habits of inquiry, interpretation, and oratory in students. The theory of culture here is indebted to Clifford Geertz and Jerome Bruner’s social-semiotic view, which identifies culture as the social construction of narrative, symbols, and practices that shape the identity and meaning-making of certain communities. The theological framework of analysis is indebted to George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic view, which emphasizes the role of doctrine as grammatical rules that govern narratives, doctrinal grammars, and social practices for distinct religious communities. This framework is pushed toward the renewal and reconstruction of religious frameworks by the postmodern work of Sheila Devaney and Kathryn Tanner. The book also employs several other concepts from social theory, borrowed from Jurgen Habermas, Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Young, and Bernard Anderson.