Doing Hospice Care for an Academic Discipline
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: theologians often have a complicated relationship with belief, and some theologians are even non-believers. I’ve always been a secular—or non-religious—person. That’s the “tradition” I was raised in. But I’m also a theologian.
I knew that it was a risk, going into the field of theology. There are conversations I’ve been shut out of because I’m not religious enough. And I’m often marked as a troubling outsider by scholars who see themselves taking a purely secular approach to the interdisciplinary study of religion. But as a graduate student, and even early in my career as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I believed the field of theology was opening up, and becoming more complex. It felt, to me, as if there were a creative disintegration happening that might make more room for scholars like me. But after more than a decade in the field, I’ve come to feel that something else is happening instead. It feels like the field is dying.
People are still doing theology in public (if, by doing theology we mean talking about gods, spirits, and other divine powers). But the field I was trained in as a scholar—academic theology—feels like it’s dying. It’s a field that’s often philosophical, but always theoretical. Because of this, theology can verge quickly into the abstract, and the speculative. Theologians might make use of anthropological, sociological, and historical studies of religion. But they tend not to feel beholden to any of those disciplines. Indeed, theologians are often wading into explicitly interdisciplinary conversations about science, politics, gender, and race (among other things). In its lack of clear focus, theology might be the most undisciplined discipline in the American academy today. And that undisciplined discipline feels like it’s dying. At least to me.
But is theology really dying? Or is this just the feeling I have, as I’m being squeezed out of the field? Or, perhaps I’m I fixated on the mortality of this collective project because I’ve been writing, thinking, and teaching about death.[1] When I looked at enrollment numbers at seminaries and theological schools, the numbers aren’t necessarily damning. At least not yet. They don’t necessarily confirm my feeling, or my mood. Neither did Sean Larsen’s 2020 State of Theology study[2], funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. There were people, in that study, who remained optimistic about the discipline’s prospects. And while Ted Smith’s 2023 book The End of Theological Education[3] does acknowledge that the institutions that built theology in America are collapsing, he remains optimistic about what the church can do for the future of theology.
I needed to know if others shared my feeling, or mood. So, I decided to have a conversation with my colleagues. I reached out to people in my network, to see who felt compelled to weigh in. I had three questions for them: Is academic theology really dying? If so, how do you feel about this death? And, finally, If you could save one thing from the sinking ship that is academic theology, what would it be? This essay is a kind of report: it’s what my colleagues told me.
What you’ll read here does reflect a bias: these are voices from within my network. Nevertheless, I think their words are worth sharing. Whether or not academic theology is really dying, it may still be worth thinking about its mortality. If I’ve learned any lesson from writing and thinking about death, it’s that when we acknowledge that it’s there, when we remember that we’re always living in death’s shadows, we take what’s in front of us much more seriously. We can see the full fragility of things, and we can try—against the odds—to resist entropy and protect what we think is worth saving, inheriting, or carrying on into the future. And we can think about what we’re ready to let go of. Because all things, in time, do die. It’s only a question of when.
Is academic theology dying?
“It feels like it is,” said Scott Kirkland, of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne. But, like me, Scott admitted that he’s “sort of suspicious of the feeling, at the same time.” Perhaps part of the problem is that it feels as if theology has been dying for a long time. “I can’t think of a time when it wasn’t dying,” said Adam Braun, at California Lutheran University. Perhaps the field has always been contingent, struggling, and looking for a space where it might actually thrive. But the feeling has become acute enough that it’s driven some people out of the field entirely—some by choice, others by the dwindling numbers of open positions. Morrey Davis was the academic dean at Drew University’s Theological School when I was a graduate student there, and he has since left academia. For him, the mortality of the institution was too much to shoulder. “I found myself saying, ‘I feel like I’m working hospice for a dying institution’” Morrey told me. “It felt like a long, slow death. And I was ready to do something else.”
How long has the field been dying? How slow will this death be? Hanna Reichel, who is on the faculty at Princeton Theological Seminary gestured back in time, toward 19th century figures like Friedrich Schleiermacher who were already stewing over the emptying of churches, as the theaters filled. “It can sound,” said Hanna, “like a rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated sort of thing.” Having received their education in liberation theology in a church in Latin America, and after being trained in a small seminary in Lebanon, Hanna’s own feeling is that this anxiety about the decline in cultural power or dominance might be particular to our American context. “It’s a very American model, to imagine that there always has to be growth, or dominance,” said Hanna, “but there are plenty of things that have existence in this world without achieving the status of dominance,” and “this doesn’t mean that they will go rapidly extinct.” Meg Mercury, a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley suggested that perhaps theology is simply “critically endangered”, rather than on the verge of extinction.
The death of theology may be nothing new, then. Even still, Hanna noted, “the tendency of decline is not to be denied.” This is true even for scholars like Hanna, at Ivy League institutions with massive endowments. “In some sense, we’re blissfully immune from the pressures on the field,” said Hanna. Princeton isn’t dependent upon enrollment numbers in order to survive—its money comes from elsewhere. But, for Hanna “the mood doesn’t feel that way. It puzzles me to no end now much it affects the mood, even at a place like this, where we could be less anxiety-driven.”
Perhaps, suggested Shelly Rambo of Boston University, “the death of a certain kind of theology has already happened,” and “we’re living in the relic or residue of it. And it feels confusing.” Maybe this sense of confusion is infectious and has spread, like a virus, through the discipline as a whole. Brian Bantum, of Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago echoed Shelly’s speculation, to some degree. “The centrality of theology to the larger intellectual life of higher education is dead,” he said. “But academic theology as its own ecosystem continues to live on, even if it’s a sort of half-life. We’re still beholden to the structure, and have our identities wrapped up in it in really weird ways.” But “whether or not anybody else actually cares is a question.”
Wherever we live in the world, including those places where academic theology once thrived (like the US and Europe), there are much bigger issues to worry about. “The world is on fire,” said David Kline, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In the midst of this chaos, “people are just very cynical about things like religion and theology.” He’s sympathetic. “If you really want something that will aid you in a flourishing life, or give you real intellectual fulfillment,” these days, “theology is not it.”
One of these crises is that of higher education itself, particularly in the humanities (which often houses departments of religion). As Sameer Yadav, a faculty member in Baylor University’s Department of Religion put it, “There’s a widespread crisis in higher education that’s impacting theology.” David Kline agrees. The death of theology is just a symptom of something bigger, what David described as “the death of institutional frameworks for intellectual life.”
While it’s no doubt the case that theology’s fate can’t be considered apart from this bigger educational crisis, it’s not clear that addressing this crisis would help theology in any concrete way. “Even if there were some overhaul, some New Deal investment in academic education, this would be unlikely to impact academic theology,” said David Congdon, a senior editor at the University of Kansas Press who was trained in theology and continues to actively publish his own books in the field. Why wouldn’t theology benefit in this hypothetical situation? Because of the fact, said David, that “so much theological research is carried out in institutions affiliated with ecclesiastical institutions.” Theology is too linked to the church for the academy to find any real motive to save it. Theology is the church’s problem.
Many of my colleagues noted that theology is also dying because religion itself has become an increasingly partisan issue in American politics. There is a decreasing desire to think and speak about theology in American colleges and universities because the assumption is often made that this will draw people into a particular sort of partisan conversation. “As Christianity has increasingly politicized and become more identified with the radical right, it becomes harder and harder to justify devoting resources to theology,” said Adam Kotsko, who is on the faculty of the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. Adam’s point was echoed by Colby Dickinson, who teaches theology at Loyola University in Chicago. “There are a lot of people who are totally uninterested in taking part in a pseudo-political movement that brands itself as religion but, really, is an ideological tradition,” he observed. Chuck Mathewes, who teaches theology at the University of Virginia—a rare public university in the US with a theology program—also pointed to this trend. After thirty years of teaching at UVA, he’s found this to be especially true of the newest generation of students, who seem increasingly uninterested in discussing theology across lines of religious difference. “It’s a very different context than the one I came up in,” Chuck observed.
While it may be the case that academics outside of the field tend to collapse theology into the church, it’s not the case that the church provides a safe space for theology to shelter. For one thing, as several of my colleagues noted, seminaries and churches are increasingly less interested in the kind of theoretical knowledge that theologians tend to teach and produce. “The people who tend to identify most vocally with religious traditions are also part of an anti-intellectual push,” observed Meg Mercury. “Where is the room, then, to have theological conversations?” For Robert Saler, a professor at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, among many people he knows who are going into ministry, “there’s a lot of active suspicion towards theology.” Many also make the argument that, “‘naive’ theology just preaches well.” It wouldn’t seem, then, that the church has a deep and vested interest in saving theology. “It can’t be lost on church leaders that, when someone studies theology seriously, it’s something of a coin flip as to whether or not they’re going to leave the church altogether,” Adam Kotsko observed.
It’s not clear to many of my colleagues, however, that the church would even be able to save theology if it wanted to. Many spoke about the death of the mainline Christian denominations that built American theological schools. For many theology is dying—at least in part—because a certain kind of church is dying. Whether or not the church wants theology, it’s taking theology down with it as it goes. “It used to be the case that academic theology was a thing, because Christendom was a thing,” said Sameer Yadav. “The more that Christendom as a thing becomes less manifest in institutional contexts, the background conditions against which academic theology makes sense just kind of erode.” Morrey Davis agrees. “The larger cultural and political supports that built academic theology don’t exist anymore. Its traditional pathway to people’s ears and eyes has deteriorated.”
The church has such a direct impact on the curriculum at many institutions, this has left some faculty wishing the church were better at actively facing its own mortality. Scott Kirkland noted that of the roughly 150 students at his institution, less than five are pursuing ordination in the Anglican Church. And yet, seminaries like the one he works at are single-mindedly, “chasing after these people who don’t exist: people going into professional ministry.” It’s left him feeling as if seminaries are suffering from “some kind of death drive.” Adam Braun finds himself wishing, at regular weekly meetings, “that the churches would confront their own reality, so we could imagine something else.” But, he laments, “there’s such a resistance to imagining something else, it’s baffling to me.”
How do you feel about the death of theology?
Many of my colleagues were, at least in part, actually somewhat heartened by the larger cultural shifts that have been making theology less relevant. “There’s really been a decline of Christian hegemony, globally. So, the colonial forms of Christianity have been in decline,” said Colby Dickinson. “It’s good to watch theology fade, because it means that these colonial legacies are being questioned.” Indeed, Colby mused, “I sometimes wonder if the most authentic thing that theology could do—in its modern context—is not be afraid of dying? Part of me thinks this would be the best thing to do as a representative of theology—to let go of any need to defend some institutionalized guild theology. Maybe we just need to let that die.”
For Hanna Reichel, to accept the death of theology could mean that we’re no longer grasping after growth that’s unsustainable. We live on a finite planet, and we’re increasingly recognizing that when it comes to ecology, growth isn’t an inherent good. Yet, our institutions continue to pursue a “grow against the trends” approach. “We need to learn an ars moriendi. We have to learn how to die, in the face of that,” said Hanna. “Or at least, how to be more finite. And that’s hard. It’s hard for humans, but it’s especially hard for Americans.”
If it is the case that the death of theology is linked to the decolonization of Christianity and its ancient institutions, this gives some the sense that we have an ethical obligation to accept the death and mortality of theology. Peter Capretto, who teaches at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, has noticed the extent to which institutions like his have been working to become more racially and ethnically diverse. As this happens, institutional curriculum has changed. Peter has noticed a clear trend toward cutting theology out of the seminary curriculum. The exception, said Peter, is practical theology—a subfield that explicitly dissociates itself from the abstract, speculative, theoretical (presumably Western and European) baggage of the field. While Peter is irked by the outright rejection of theory, and skeptical about the value of practical theology, he admits that he tries to be mindful about what his own resistance might mean. “Part of me does wonder,” said Peter, “is the claim that academic theology is dying just a code for resisting that decolonization?”
Elias Ortega is president of the Meadville Lombard Theological School, in Chicago. He has noted the same trends as Peter. For his part, Elias sees highly theoretical theology as an at-risk discipline because, in essence, “it’s just not especially connected to the real needs that people have when it comes to meaning-making, or solving problems in the world.” And yet, Elias also refuses to concede that abstract speculation is something that seminary students don’t need. “I think there’s a place for abstract reflection,” he said. “It’s important. For me, the rub is: can you even have conversation about practical matters without a strong theoretical position? I would say, ‘no.’”
Amaryah Armstrong is a professor at Virginia Tech. She earned her PhD in theology from Vanderbilt University, but her current position as a specialist in race and American religion is in the Department of Religion and Culture. You wouldn’t necessarily know that she has a background in theology, in other words. Her emigration out of the discipline of theology wasn’t accidental. While Amaryah did consider teaching positions in a seminary context, she also felt pessimistic about how much these institutions were actually doing for their increasingly diverse student body, and the faculty who teach them. “Theological schools are dying, and the way that they’re sustaining themselves is to reach out to more students of color,” said Amaryah. “And now these students are becoming indebted for this education, and the education they’re getting is not as good.” Part of the reason for this is the increasingly contingent conditions of the faculty. “If the conditions their professors are working under aren’t good, their education is not as good.”
Another part of the problem, for Amaryah, is the anti-intellectual and anti-theoretical sensibility that seems to have overtaken seminaries. The only relevant question for theologians, perhaps, has become: how will this preach? For theologians, this means that the only relevant work is the kind that can produce hope for redemption. “However unsaid it is, there’s a desire for a certain kind of affective resolution in theology,” Amaryah noted. “People want hope, people want solidarity, people want to feel some kind of unity. Maybe they’re willing to go through some kind of melancholy or lament. But they want to get to the other side of that by the end of the book, or whatever.” For Amaryah this is a problem because, “it always puts a limit on how you’re thinking about something. To me, honestly, it puts a limit on the study of God. The reason I left fundamentalism was that there was that kind of limit, in terms of the sorts of questions we should be asking.” Amaryah resists the demand that theologians only produce work with one central form of feeling.
While Amaryah might be disillusioned by what’s happening in American seminaries, she was also more optimistic than many about the future of academic theology. When I asked her if theology is dying, she wasn’t ready to concede that. Instead, she described theology as simply “in diaspora.” It’s migrating. Chuck Mathewes agreed. “I find the categories of religion and theology to be fugitive across other disciplines,” Chuck said. “There’s almost a diasporic character to things.” For instance, “there are social theorists out there with the ambition to tell big stories about modernity that sometimes verge on the theological.” Chuck also noted that it should be “an object of real critical self-interest” among theologians that two big movements in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades—the secular turn and the emergence of category of political theology—have mostly bypassed scholars of religious studies and theology. “I’m sorry to say this but the way that religion has become important to these conversations is not because of what people in religious studies and theology have done,” Chuck lamented. “There’s often a disciplinary sense of inferiority in our field,” he noted. “But it’s also the case that the inferiority is well-evidenced, as so much of this work that’s exciting did not originate in our field.”
Perhaps this is, in part, because theologians have felt too limited by their own institutional contexts—especially by the way that the church binds and structures the field. Martin Kavka, who teaches at Florida State University and described himself to me as a scholar of theology, but not a believer, is more resistant to feelings of resignation. Martin teaches at a public university and doesn’t believe intellectual work that’s theological should be restricted to ecclesiastical contexts. He’s thinking about theology beyond the confines of the dying church, and he’s more optimistic about theology’s potential to survive outside its apparently incipient conditions. “I think that theology is dying because we haven’t really realized what counts as theology, and what theology can do,” he said. In the face of this, he asks, “why give seminaries the last word? What gives them the authority to say that theology is this, and not that? People just don’t want to fight them. And that’s shameful.”
If theology is a sinking ship, what do you save as it sinks?
Learning to die well isn’t just a simple act of resigning ourselves to finitude, though I think many limit their sense of what an ars moriendi is to this important initial gesture. Learning to die also includes the important act of seeing beyond the limits set by our own individual selves—the task of situating ourselves in a context that is bigger, and more enduring. This can look practical. It can mean taking stock of our resources and determining where we want these resources to pass, as we fade. It can look like making a legacy. But it can also become a more speculative task. It can look like an act of world-making: speaking to others about what it is that lifts us up, fills us with joy, or terror, or surfaces as sustenance while we pass toward the very limits of life itself. The sense of vision that we have, at the very edge of our mortality, can be prophetic for others who are too caught up in the intense force and flow of life to see much beyond it. What we see at these limits can reshape the world that others will continue to live in.
I think this can be true for collective mortality as well. For instance, as a collective of people working in a finite academic field with narrowing limits, part of learning to die is the acknowledgement that the field (like all things) is finite. There will come a time when it will no longer grow and can’t be refreshed or rehabilitated. But dying well is more than the act of seeing this. It’s also the act of determining what we want to pass on, and how. It’s the act of sharing what it is we see, at those outer limits. Both of these tasks—the speculative work and the legacy building—are creative.
“This feels like a creative moment,” Shelly Rambo told me. But, she also acknowledged that she can understand why theologians aren’t being especially creative. Shelly’s own research has incorporated trauma studies, and she’s found this work increasingly relevant for understanding her field. “I’m finding that in these structures in which we work, there is so much fear. People are not operating as their best selves. There’s a lot of flight and flight going on.” The institutional contexts are, increasingly, in “survival mode.” This is one of the reasons why I asked each of my colleagues to reflect on what it is they would save, from the discipline of academic theology, if it is indeed a sinking ship. What would they bring with them onto the lifeboat?
Many expressed a desire to save specific schools of thought, especially liberation theology. “We’re always going to need resources for resistance,” said David Congdon. “Even if religion as such dies. The need to empower and inform some kind of resistance is always going to be necessary and I think that the liberation theology archive will be important for that, even if we don’t use the word God.” Shelly Rambo named feminist theology as the movement she would save. “I feel like feminist theology really prepares you for the lifeboat,” she observed. “It’s always had to deal with disappointment. ‘Feminist’ is still a word that people don’t want to use, in theology. I’ve learned from the women who’ve taught me that navigating possibility and despair is a feminist practice.” For Chuck Mathewes, the archive of apocalyptic thought is something worth preserving. “Theology is one of the disciplines that has most explicitly thought about the end of the world,” he said. “So, I think theology can still be a resource for people who want to think about the end of the world, and how to mourn that. I think this is an important task for humanity in general.”
Others celebrated the undisciplined nature of our discipline and offered a hope that we might be able to preserve something of that in an academic environment that is increasingly caught up in the bonds of specialization. As Sameer Yadav described it, one of the best things about theology is its existence as almost a nowhere space. Sameer grew up in rural Idaho, in a Hindu home. Later on, as a college student, he converted to Christianity. Despite the fact that he now belonged to a majority community in the US, he still felt “religiously liminal,” as he described it. “I’ve always felt like I have one foot out of whatever it is I’m doing,” he said. “And theology is conducive to that one foot out position.” It’s because, he said, theology exists as “a kind of nowhere place, in terms of communal belonging.” That can be challenging, of course. As an academic theologian, you never really feel like you fit into the academy nor does the church (or one’s own religious community) feel like an especially comfortable space. It’s difficult to feel like you belong anywhere. “But that’s part of what’s attractive about theology, to me,” said Sameer. “It’s a kind of refuge from singular sources of normative accountability.”
A number of colleagues echoed Sameer, even expressing a desire to see theology’s liminal status as a discipline become more explicitly open to non-confessional thinking, and to thinkers who don’t actually identify with a religious tradition. “With the growing number of people who don’t identify as religious, are we as scholars responding to them in ways that feel relevant? Or are we stuck in old categories and conversations that no longer feel relevant to people?,” Meg Mercury asked me. “Not that I want to chase relevance. But I just don’t want to do theology in that same old framework.” Elias Ortega noted that, from his perspective, the spiritual lives of religiously unaffiliated people are interesting, and incredibly diverse. “These could be spaces of deep creativity,” he said. “But if you don’t have some kind of institutional structure, it’s all based on charismatic personality. And that fizzles out. So, how might we create some sort of container, for the next generation of people to carry something on? What would that look like?”
Thinking about how theology can break out of its own traditional confines might feel risky, perhaps in part because it would mean indulging new kinds of theories, speculations, and imaginative pictures. But this sense of risk can also feel enticing. Morrey Davis described this historical moment as “ripe” for new conversations about theology that break out of theology’s own historical institutional confines. When we look closely, we can see people’s desire to do theology in what feels like a growing hunger for conspiracy theories, for instance. Are there other ways to channel collective desires for imaginative, speculative, thinking that’s more democratically productive? “What worries me, and also gives me a little hope, are the wild imaginations of people,” said Morrey, “who will always just make shit up. No matter what, people make shit up. But they do it because they need it,” he reflected.
For Scott Kirkland, perhaps, theology has always already been ready for this sort of wide-ranging imaginative work. He has many students, he said, who are drawn to theology not because they’re religious, or because they believe that it has a clear professional payoff for them, but rather, “because it’s weird.” Scott even feels like “theology could live, if it were just allowed to be weird.” Colby Dickinson describes one of theology’s best features as its ability to make trouble. “I wish theology did a better job of representing its ability to be prophetic, and troubling,” he said. “I think it’s a beautiful impulse: to be critical, to see things differently. It can be unsettling. But it’s the sort of challenge put forward by people who are fighting the good fight, so to speak.”
Maybe one small dimension of the good fight is the struggle to keep affirming one thing that theology hasn’t always been great at affirming, but should have been. Robert Saler reflected that, if theology were a sinking ship, one thing he would want to preserve is “just some sort of grace.” That is to say, “the claim that there’s a dignity, an inherent worth in who and what you are. A lot of what excites me about theology is just asserting that, over and against the constant demands to earn our worth—against whatever the mechanisms of the time are, for achieving it.” It may not be a productive way to think about what theology is, and what it can do. Theology’s lack of “cash value” might be a threat to its existential reality in the institutional culture of American higher education today. But perhaps the affirmation of being valueless to a culture with questionable values—of being another source of valuation—is one of the best things we can pass along to others, in whatever conditions of struggle they might find themselves in, and in whatever form they stumble upon theology.
And here are my own final thoughts…
I conducted these interviews in the spring of 2024, in what feels to me (now) like a different world. What David Kline so succinctly described as the “institutional frameworks for intellectual life” seem more fragile and threatened than ever, as the Trump administration rapidly defunds education and research, and attacks media outlets. And we can’t forget, of course, about the many threats that Artificial Intelligence—in the form of Large Language Models like ChatGPT—poses to these fragile frameworks for intellectual life. I’m aware that it may seem small-minded and naïve to worry about my own obscure little academic discipline, when the whole structure is falling apart. So, it does seem important for me to clarify that I have spent (and will continue to spend) many hours grieving, as if in anticipation, what feels like the evaporation of intellectual possibilities—intellectual life itself!—in America. I am torn up about all of this. And yet, simultaneously, I do remain concerned about the strange little ecosystem that comprises my corner of the world.
As I think over these conversations with my colleagues, I find myself torn between letting go and holding on—or, perhaps better said, trying to hold space. I agree with Hanna Reichel when they suggest that letting go of the growth mindset is painful and difficult for Americans, perhaps more than anyone else. And this contributes to so much of the damage that American life does to the planet we share with others. I recognize that this is a problem. And I am compelled by Colby Dickinson’s suggestion that perhaps learning to die—learning an ars moriendi—might be the best thing that theology could do right now. So much of what is good about theology is probably already in diaspora, as Amaryah Armstrong has suggested. I do have a certain kind of faith that much of the power of theology will live on, in some shape and form, wherever it goes.
And yet Sameer Yadav’s point about academic theology existing as a kind of “nowhere” space strikes me as so deeply true. That nowhere space has given me so much room to explore, it’s opened dimensions of life to me that I would never have seen, and it’s introduced me to so many incredible people—living and dead. I am grateful for this community, and I feel like I owe it something. I feel compelled to somehow preserve that generative and undisciplined nowhere space for others. Like Meg Mercury, I would like to see this nowhere space open up and expand, for those people who don’t feel as if they belong in traditional religious structures. And yet, I also recognize that the cash value of this sort of space—for the church and for the academy—is more or less zero. The odds that it will survive, even if (as David Congdon noted) there is some educational New Deal that revives higher education, are slim. But perhaps this is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to speak with my colleagues, and write this piece, in the first place. Perhaps it was a gesture at letting go. Or perhaps it was a little leap of faith—a little gesture towards expanding space and time for this nowhere community to find new forms of shelter in which to gather.
[1] See, for instance, my book Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying (Columbia University Press, 2023): https://cup.columbia.edu/book/sister-death/9780231208376/ .
[2] You can read the full study here: https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/syndicate-project-on-the-state-of-theology/ .
[3] Link to Ted Smith’s The End of Theological Education (Eerdman’s, 2023): https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802878878/the-end-of-theological-education/ .