Stephen Fowl on Theology, Teaching, and the Path Ahead for CDSP

Dr. Stephen Fowl is the newly appointed president and dean of Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He spoke to us about his approach to scholarship and teaching, curriculum revision and community formation in CDSP's Hybrid Program, and what he learned as a faculty member and senior administrator in a large Jesuit university.

Transcript

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Kyle Oliver: Before we begin the show, I just want to say that Dr. Fowl was able to sit for this interview at a time where there was some road noise happening outside of his office. That noise comes in occasionally and you can hear it but I don't think it's going to pull you out of the conversation.  

Thank you for bearing with the construction happening in Berkeley and with that, on with the show. 

[Main titles] 

KO:  Hi, this is Kyle Oliver at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and I am here with a very special episode of Crossings Conversations. We are here with Dr. Stephen Fowl, our new president and dean. We're going to have a chat to get to know Dr. Fowl a little bit and to talk about his scholarship and what it's been like to get to know CDSP and all the things you'd expect to hear from somebody just getting started with a new community. Welcome, we are really glad to have you here. 

Stephen Fowl: I'm pleased to be able to talk to folks and I'm looking forward to it. 

KO: Thank you. In the spirit of having an informal conversation, Steve, if I may, let's start at the present moment and then we'll rewind a little bit. What has it been like starting to get to know the CDSP community? 

SF: I guess there are really two main tasks I've had, at least I've set for myself. The first is getting to know all the folks. I try and drop in on people, not to surprise them, but unplanned ways to simply learn about their jobs. I think one of the most impressive things has been that amidst all the change, challenges, and uncertainties about in the past several years, everybody I've spoken with is deeply committed to the seminary and to the success of the students. That's been wonderful. It's so gratifying to be a part of. 

It's made the welcome so much easier and made the transition so much lighter. The other part is learning about the institution, and that's a bigger job. Every day, I learn lots of new things. I'm slowly, slowly getting a handle on all of the different pieces here. I've already come to deeply appreciate all the great people that work here. 

KO: It'd be good practice for folks. I'm thinking about students and the fact that they'll be leading communities someday and be in this very same situation of having to get to know a community and ask lots of questions and all that. 

I guess we should say that we're having this conversation in August. I don't think you've met a lot of students yet. Is that right? 

SF: That is true. I've made a point to reach out to the president of the Hybrid Student Group and the president of the Residential Student Group. I've had lunch with the president of the Residential Group, Emily Hyberg, and I've had a couple of Zooms with Hannah Curtis, the president of the Hybrid Students Group. That's about it. I'm looking forward to meeting all the students when they come and when the semester starts. 

KO: Great. Have you spent a lot of time on the West Coast? I know you've worked mostly on the East Coast, what's it been like being here and how unfamiliar or not are your new environments? 

SF: I did spend a year as scholar in residence at Seattle Pacific University seven years ago, and we had a magical year in Seattle, but sabbaticals are always a bit of a fantasy world, right? I know on the East Coast, we think of everybody in California as facing imminent disaster from earthquake and wildfires. Having been here now about three and a half weeks, the weather is worth it. It's worth the risk, I've decided. 

Baltimore, in really from mid-July through the end of August, you'll go for a week where it starts in the low 90s, in the mid-90s, hits 100, high humidity throughout, there'll be a thunderstorm, and it starts again. Of course, Berkeley is the land that humidity, I forgot. It's been marvelous. That's been great. I've also really just benefited from being able to live so close to my office, and I spend almost no time in the car. Berkeley's a very walkable place for us, and I really enjoyed that part too. 

KO: That's great. Let's dive in a little bit and help folks get to know you. I thought maybe we could start with some material about your scholarship. I've been reading, what I think is your most recent book, this book on idolatry. It sounds like you're interested in doing theology alongside scripture if that makes sense. I'm wondering if I have that right and I'm wondering if you might say a little bit more about that and a bit about why that makes sense to you as a scholar. 

SF: Sure. I love that phrase, doing theology alongside scripture. Really, the entirety of my career has been about trying to combine the interests of theologians and biblical scholars. If you've been to seminary that often those two things don't exist very happily together, I've always found that unusual and a bit strange, at least from a theological perspective. My work has really been about trying to revive what's always been a Christian practice of reading scripture theologically. The book on idolatry is an in another example of trying to do that. 

At its best, I suppose, theology is really just a form of exegesis, not just a form, but is a form of exegesis of reading the biblical texts closely, either in the light of specific questions or with the aim of fitting together, showing how the coherence of Christian believing can be made manifest in a particular context. That's important. I think partly because technical scholarship around scripture can be really off-putting both for laypeople, but for seminarians too, where you come away from listening to somebody talk about that. You think, "I don't know Greek, I haven't mastered the history of the first several centuries. I'm just totally disabled from reading this text." While I do think those technical questions are really important, answering them on their own doesn't open up the scripture to believing people. I want to pay attention to those questions and give them their due. I don't think that's the last word. That theological engagement really is crucial. In the end, as Christians, we are called to embody scripture, to embody our reading of scripture. If I can help folks do that, that would be wonderful. I'd consider myself successful. 

KO: I think I hear you nodding too these more cohesive and integrative ways of thinking, which I think flows really well into my next question, which is that another theme that I think I'm noticing in your work is you talking a lot about Christian formation, about habits and practices for faithful living as they emerge from whatever theological topic you're engaged with. 

 How do you wish more people thought about that connection between scripture and what it's like to live the Christian faith, to walk the Christian way? 

SF: Well, maybe it's a way of expanding on some things I've already said is to use an image from Saint Augustine, to think of our lives as a journey into ever deeper love of God and of neighbor. If that's what we are called to do, then scripture is one of the vehicles, perhaps the best vehicle we can get on to make that journey. 

It's allowing scripture to, in all sorts of ways, to help us live into ever deeper love of God and neighbor, to show what that looks like in very concrete ways, to show what that looks like in terms of what we ought to think about and pray about, to help it guide our worship and our meditations, to help it direct our actions in the public sphere.  

If we begin there, then the place of scripture becomes helping us make that journey more effectively, more broadly and comprehensively, and maybe more faithfully too. 

it's an instrument to what's ultimate. It's not the ultimate thing itself. 

I think if you begin to adopt that view, it helps you be a little bit more relaxed about places in the Bible that don't seem consistent with other places or historical findings that might seem to be at odds with the historical statements of scripture. It's an instrument. That way, we don't have to shed blood or relationships or create a lot of hostility around determining the nature of this text because it's been given to us by God to do something with, not simply to be there, to primarily focus it on something that we used to get to our true home. Again, to follow along with Augustine here, he also understands that you can get so used to this journey, to the ride that the vehicle is providing that you actually forget that you're on a journey somewhere. 

He worries that you can become so caught up in the vehicle that you lose track of the fact it's moving you somewhere, or it's meant to move you somewhere, and you end up not getting to your goal as well or as easily as you ought to. 

KO: Yes, that's really helpful. Before we shift gears, staying on the scholarship and teaching thread here, what kind of a teacher would you say that you are? 

SF: As I have moved through my career in the classroom, I've become ever more concerned that I joined the concerns of the writers and texts that I'm looking at with the concerns of the students in that classroom. For most of my career, it's been undergraduates in introductory to theology classes. It'd still be the same when I've taught seminarians in the past, is to help them have a dialogue with the texts and the authors that we're covering. 

It's important that I make the concerns of those writers and the concerns of those texts in their times, understandable to the students in a way that helps them see the connections with the concerns and interests that they have in their times, in our times. Then to see these texts as ways of having a temporarily extended or even geographically extended conversation about things both the students and the texts care about. As I've gone on in my career, I actually end up covering less material than I used to, and I'm more at ease with that. 

If I can get the students to make that connection  

KO: Well, that sounds like a worthy goal. Will CDSP students have a chance to be in the classroom with you on a regular basis? 

SF: Well, yes. The other answer is that both Dr. Mark Hearn, who's our dean of academic affairs, and I are both in our first years in our jobs and we've agreed with each other we won't teach this year. Moving into the future, I do plan to offer courses in New Testament, maybe a course in Paul which is my real scholarly specialty, but also, in ethics as well. My very first teaching job was teaching in a Church of England seminary as the ethics lecturer.  

KO: That's great. Okay. Well, let's shift gears to a little bit more about leadership and some of the more ecclesial dimensions of your work. Let's start by talking a little bit about the last six years or so. You've been the dean of the Loyola College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Maryland. That was a big and very different job. I'm curious what kind of takeaways you're bringing with you from supervising, I'm looking at my notes here, almost 300 faculty members and managing a budget in the tens of millions of dollars. That sounds intense. What was that like? What are you bringing with you? 

SF: Those numbers are helpful to the extent that they indicate no one person can micromanage, that many people and that much money. One of the steep learning curves in becoming dean was to realize I can't control everything. I have to delegate. I can't micromanage. I think actually, although CDSP is a smaller institution, I do think that habit of delegating jobs to people, letting the people who are most closely associated with the particular job manage that job in a way that they think is best. 

Holding them accountable, overseeing, and keeping my eyes on that is something I think just the harsh realities of such a large job as dean at Loyola was, it forced me to have to do that because I think it was not my nature to give up oversight and control, but I had to. Now, I understand why it's important to do. So far, I'm just so impressed with the work that the people who work here are capable of. I'm quite happy to be better at delegating than I was six years ago. 

I think both institutions are really mission-driven and helping to articulate a vision of that mission for everybody and to help them understand that they are a part of an institution that has a mission that's bigger than them. I think at Loyola, when people, in this idea that they were part of, in fact, an extremely long-running pattern of Jesuit education, nearly 500 years. That always can be used to help inspire people to do their best. 

I think CDSP, again, as a mission-driven organization, one of my roles is to articulate that mission and to help us live into that mission with consistency, grace, and energy. In doing so, help everybody who works here understand that it's bigger than them and that they're contributing to something bigger than they are. 

KO: Speaking of things that are bigger than any one person and feeling bound up in these larger movements, I'd love to zoom in on something that you've written about to our community already just in your first couple of weeks. You've said that you've thought for a long time about, what you call, the headwinds that are facing people who are preparing for ministry leadership in today's church and social climate. 

How would you characterize the road ahead for people thinking about the future of ministry? 

SF: That's a big question. Let me try and answer it in the light of CDSP. Because I think anyone today hearing a call to ministry, especially ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church, is faced with an immediate set of challenges independently of the whole discernment process. Will I have to uproot my family and move to seminary? Taking on debt? Even if there's a scholarship, will I have to take on debt for living expenses? 

What about all these people who have been part of my discernment journey and have been there with me and the community I know well, I'm going to pull myself out of that and then take on debt and then not necessarily have a guarantee of a full-time job at the other end. All of those things put pressure on anyone who is discerning a call to ministry. That's even before they really begin the hard work of engaging in the formation that seminary is. 

One of the things that is most exciting, without question for me, about what CDSP is doing, is that it allows the low-residency Hybrid Program, allows people to be in their contexts, gives them skills for analyzing their context because we shouldn't assume that we just naturally understand our contexts as fully as we ought. We are able to begin that process of cultivating the sensibilities and skills, the theological imagination, that all ordained clergy will need to do whatever ministry God calls them to. 

Through the technological advances that are available to us in hybrid learning now, we will be able to help them form community, both in the in-person moments that we have, but also to use the technology that is available to sustain other forms of community and to send them out into two years of curacy without debt and with a guarantee of a job. You couldn't imagine richer ground to be able to plant a seed into. At least to me, I couldn't. 

That was so exciting about the opportunities here, is that it was responsive to the headwinds, both the headwinds that people with called the ministry face, but the headwinds that any independent seminary faces. Through Trinity's generosity, the resources that we need to do this well are available to us. The opportunity to think and create a curriculum that will achieve these things, that's the big task right before us. All of the pieces are there for success. It's really exciting, too. The headwinds haven't changed. They're real, and they're not going away, but the opportunities are great, too. 

KO: You've spoken to what you've been up to so far but to the extent that you have some insight into this now, what do you think is going to be the most important part of your job in the next year or so? How are you going to try to focus your time and energy? 

SF: Well, leading the construction of the curriculum for the new program is really the most important and pressing thing. We've set ourselves a really ambitious goal of having a curriculum, if not finalized, at least ready to show people in a little over a year's time. That's going to be hard work. This will be the sixth time in my career in higher education that I've participated in curriculum revision, and they're always hard work. That helping both lead that, cheerlead for those who are also doing work, support that. That's a sustaining part of each week's work, I think, for me. The other piece of that, while all of that is really forward-looking and exciting, we have a wonderful class of residential students here. We want to make sure that their experience is what they need for moving into their ministries. The excitement of the future always provides that temptation for letting the folks engaged in the present fall through the cracks. I want to be sure, really attentive to the fact that we don't do that and we shouldn't do that. 

That's partly why I've been reaching out to as many students as I can.  

The residential students we have now need to have that residential student experience of corporate worship on a regular basis. They will all be living together in the Nichols building. They will have some opportunities to form their own community and to do their own form of worship together in Nichols. We are going to make sure that there are opportunities to gather regularly in person with the faculty and the staff to celebrate our togetherness, our community.  

We want to make sure that they have an opportunity for all of the benefits that a residential program has of learning in person with other people who are also learning in person.  

Those two things are big and pressing activities for us. The other things are a little more typical of any academic institution of getting schedules, reviewing faculty, and supervising things. I have lots of good people to help with that. That bit is a little more familiar to me. I know that rhythm.  

KO: I think it would be easy for someone to assume that curriculum revision is about moving a list of courses around a spreadsheet, or what have you-- [crosstalk] Are you in, are you out? What year do you belong in, et cetera? I know that's not actually what it looks like, so I'm wondering if you could say a bit more about what that process even entails. 

SF: I think every time I've done this and including this time, in an abstract way, folks would all agree that the best way to begin is to figure out what the result is supposed to be. What sort of student do you want at the end of that process? In our case, we've got six years with four years of the MDiv, plus two years of curacy. At the end of that six-year process, what sort of skills, habits, dispositions, sensibilities do we want those students to have? Our first task is coming to some general agreement around that. 

When you've done that, then you can reverse engineer the curriculum to get to that outcome. Our mission is focused enough, we are nimble enough, partly because of our size. 

I think we can actually get that picture of the ideal student, ideal graduate that we want, and generally get to a curriculum that will lead to that in a way that honors our current faculty that is manageable for both our current and our future students and will get us to that point. I have to say I begin this more optimistic than any curricular revision I've ever done before, partly because of the size and coherence of the institution. 

KO:  I wonder if you might talk a little bit about moving forward some of the ways that formation will be happening for students in the new model. 

SF: The more I've been thinking about this, and this really is in enduring in big questions. Nothing I say here is really going to resolve all of that. One of the things we need to do is to think maybe in terms of-- initially that formation is already always going on with all of us. For most people in pews in Episcopal churches, but especially those who aren't in pews in Episcopal churches, that formation is happening through the internet, various social media platforms that our desires and our hopes and our view of what is true and our spending patterns, almost every aspect of our life is being formed by our engagements. Into that, I think we have that more specific sort of residential seminary. Traditionally, that's been the way we've done something distinctive in the formation of ministers and there are some clear advantages to that model. They're engaged in the same activities over an extended period of time. They have lots of opportunities for spontaneous conversation and argument even, and for opportunities for real material ways of supporting each other. 

Of course, that came at some cost, not just the financial cost, but also the cost that comes from removing people from their native contexts and forming them elsewhere and then returning them, as if they hadn't even been away. On the one hand, the hybrid model allows people to both stay in their contexts, to learn at least through one of the media that they are very comfortable with, even if people my age are not, and to learn and grow and develop and be formed through those things that are forming us anyway. 

The challenge, of course, is, what does a community look like this way? Lots of people will tell you they have online communities and independently of anything to do with the church and that those are wonderful for them. We want to both recognize the validity of that claim, but also test it. Can we deepen it? Can we make it more Christian? 

Can we help it do the sorts of things that life together in a residential seminary might have achieved with a greater sort of ease with a lower level of intentionality because it just happened because you were there? We have to be more intentional. We have to think about how is this going to work. Will it help us do what we want it to do? I have no doubt that we will make some mistakes along the way. I hope we're attentive enough both to what our students are telling us and to our own self-reflection that we correct those mistakes. 

It'll take us a little while, but I'm confident we can get it right. 

KO: As we're talking about this, I'm sort of flashing back to lots of conversations that we, as an institution, have had with almost a decade's worth of alums of what is now called the Hybrid Program already. Listeners to this podcast will have heard from some of those folks about their profound sense of community as they've experienced it. One of the things that I got thinking of as you were talking about intentionality and it seems to me that one thing that we heard a lot from our students is there's a real sense of intentionality that happens when some of your learning is asynchronous. 

Because you're sort of not in the swirl of a classroom heated in the moment. You have a little bit of time to reflect to listen as it were to read, very intently to your classmates in a way that isn't always possible in a fast moving classroom. I think it's going to be really interesting to sort of bridge the conversations we've already been having with where we're heading. 

SF: I think this was one of the striking things in my interview. At some point, in one of the conversations, if somebody just reminded me, we've actually been doing this for a while now, it's not brand new. The mode is not brand new. The curriculum may need to be revised and will be new in certain respects, but we've been doing hybrid learning and relatively successfully for a while now. It does, as you say. It allows people to meet, move at the speed of their own learning, which Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9:00 AM class doesn't allow you to do necessarily. There are benefits to this as well that the classroom, the in-person classroom can't provide. 

KO: Briefly to close here in some sort of broad strokes, I'm wondering just sort of what are your hopes for CDSP? 

SF: This is my really ambitious ones. As I think I mentioned earlier, we have in front of us available to us all of the pieces we need to be, not just successful in launching this, sustaining this model of low-residency hybrid theological education. We can be the model for this. We have the opportunity, the imagination, and the resources to make this something extraordinary. That's my hope. I think we can actually do that too. It's not a sort of pie-in-the-sky hope, but it's a hope based on the fact that we have all the pieces there and we can do it. I think we can. 

 Okay. We have a couple of minutes. Can I ask you about the Jesuits? I really want to talk about it. 

 Of course, yes. 

KO: I think one of the things people will be really curious about is you've spent decades of your life, serving and leading in a Jesuit institution, a Roman Catholic institution. You, yourself, are an Episcopalian and I'm just curious about the sort of mashup of those things and what are you taking from this time with the Jesuits,  What has that meant to you and what might it mean going forward? 

SF: That's a great question because, as a non-Roman Catholic, teaching theology, not just teaching theology at a Jesuit University, was the fundamental generosity of spirit that is part of the Jesuit charism. This idea of finding God in all things that Ignatius wanted all of his companions to be able to do is real. I came out of a relatively conservative evangelical environment, where the talk was around the integration of faith in learning. The reality, it was often the protection of faith from learning. What the Jesuits have done is to take that idea that God can be found in all things with the utmost seriousness. There is almost no area of human endeavor where you won't find a Jesuit, which is really striking. They are everywhere. They've been there. That sort of generosity. The non-defensive openness is a great gift to anybody who is a believer, I think.  

Now, it has some downsides, of course, that you can lose a critical capacity. You can fail to see that although God might be in all places or God might be in all things, sometimes God is there as a judge and not as a cheerleader but the generosity piece was really a huge gift to me as a non-Catholic theologian teaching in the Jesuit University. 

The presumption of the goodwill of the other, which is fundamental to all Ignatian spirituality is hard, especially when you climb up the administrative ladder. It gets hard but it's crucial to really operating in an atmosphere where people are able to delegate and trust and be accountable that all of those things work properly when there is this presumption of goodwill. One of the most inspiring things is if you're not in this world is hard to imagine that as they've grown older as an order, as there are fewer of them, the Jesuits realized that they could not staff all 27 universities in the United States with Jesuits. 

They had the foresight to set up programs that form laypeople, Catholic, non-Catholic, non-religious into the educational mission of the Society of Jesus and they put time and effort and resources into that, so that now 15 or so years into that, there is a whole network of people who have been formed into the Jesuit educational mission who could in a sense go to any of these Jesuit schools and work and sustain that mission. They managed to have a lot of wisdom and foresight about what the future looked like for them and to address it. 

I just have enormous gratitude for all that I took from those years at Loyola. There are pieces that aren't always great but that's true of any of them but those are the things that are the best, I think. 

KO: Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for taking the time to share about that. 

SF: Happy to. Yes.