Over the past year, since I was dismissed from the diaconate formation program in my diocese, I have been thinking about the way the program was structured.\u00a0 Part of this was selfish:\u00a0 there were pedagogical issues that contributed, I think, to my dismissal.\u00a0 (To date I have never gotten a coherent explanation for why I was dismissed, but that is another story and not relevant to the topic at hand.)\u00a0\u00a0 But I am also a teacher by profession, and the questions involved in educating deacons are complex and\u00a0 I find them interesting and challenging.<\/p>\n
Indeed, were I to be put in charge of diaconate formation by some miracle, I have already begun to sketch out a series of changes I would make.\u00a0 There is perhaps\u00a0 a little hubris at work here\u2014this is a common failing among academics.\u00a0 I realize that there is a great deal I don\u2019t know\u00a0 about formation programs, and many ideas that I have may seem good on paper, but may then fall short because of issues I simply have not considered, either because of a lack of experience or a lack of specialized knowledge.<\/p>\n
Therefore, I want to open some of my ideas up for discussion here.\u00a0 The first idea I want to cover is the question in the title:\u00a0 what should deacons know, and how should they know it?\u00a0 The first half of the question is relatively straightforward:\u00a0 what knowledge, information and skills should be in the \u201ctoolkit\u201d of every new deacon?\u00a0 There is plenty of room for disagreement here\u2014see, for instance, my earlier post<\/a> on one question on the entrance exam administered by my diocese.\u00a0 However, there are some broad areas that I think most people will agree deacons need to have some competency: e.g., scripture, preaching, liturgy, pastoral care, Catholic ethical and social teaching.\u00a0\u00a0 But I would be interested in seeing where people would place their emphases and priorities, and why.\u00a0 And it is worth bearing in mind that the USCCB has written extensively<\/a> about diaconate formation programs.<\/p>\n The second half of the title is a more subtle epistemological question which I think I can illustrate by way of two examples.\u00a0 When I got my Ph.D. 20 years ago, I \u201cknew\u201d introductory calculus very well.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only had I studied it, but I had chosen my research specialty in an area (harmonic analysis) that is closely related to the material covered in a standard calculus course.\u00a0\u00a0 However, I would now say that I know calculus much better than I did then, because I now know how to teach calculus.\u00a0 I know which ideas are intuitively clear and which are not; I have a better grasp of which ideas to emphasize and which to omit the first time a student sees the material;\u00a0 I understand how to draw out connections between ideas that help my students begin to see the \u201cbig picture\u201d more clearly.\u00a0 Unfortunately (particularly for the students I taught in the first few years of my career) I was not taught any of this when I \u201clearned\u201d calculus\u2014I pretty much learned it by trial and error in the classroom and in discussions with other colleagues. \u00a0\u00a0 I would argue that this knowledge is not simply pedagogical skills separate from the content of calculus.\u00a0 Rather, I think it is an integral part of the conceptual organization of calculus in my own mind.<\/p>\n The second example comes from the doctoral program in preaching<\/a> at the Aquinas Institute.\u00a0 I stumbled across this program while looking for resources on homiletics.\u00a0 One feature that I found intriguing was the entrance requirements:\u00a0 students were required to have a masters in divinity and<\/strong> at least three years of ministerial experience.\u00a0 In other words, the students were required to have considerable experience in preaching, including having gone through the entire lectionary at least once. \u00a0 This suggests to me that the program organizers want their students to already \u201cknow\u201d scripture in a particular way:\u00a0 not just from a close reading of the texts (as would be gotten in any M. Div. program) but also from having to respond to these texts in the context of preaching on them.<\/p>\n So with these examples in mind, I am asking:\u00a0 how should deacons \u201cknow\u201d the topics listed above (and others that may be proposed)?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What do you expect deacons to do with their acquired knowledge and skills, and how does this shape how they should know the material?\u00a0 Is \u201cbook learning\u201d\u00a0 (however defined) sufficient?\u00a0 How should experiential knowledge be organized?<\/p>\n To start the discussion, let me sketch my own approach.\u00a0 I believe that the education of deacons should be organized functionally.\u00a0 It should start with what we (the Church) want deacons to be and to do, and work backwards to determine both the content and organization of their formation.\u00a0 For instance, deacons should have strong faith lives that are grounded in scripture\u2014whence the obligation to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.\u00a0 They are also expected to preach on a regular basis, and their homilies should, ideally, help their congregations to better understand the scripture and apply it in their own lives.\u00a0 This suggests that they should engage with scripture by praying with it\u2014the Liturgy of the Hours and Lectio Divina immediately come to mind\u2014and proclaiming it.\u00a0 As I was learning to be a lector, I was told that I could not effectively proclaim it until I understood it:\u00a0 what do the words mean?\u00a0 Where in the Bible does this passage come from?\u00a0 What are the circumstances the author was confronted with, and how was he responding to them?\u00a0 This suggests some formal scripture study, but organized in a very different way.\u00a0\u00a0 And finally,\u00a0 deacons should learn scripture by preaching on it:\u00a0 what does it mean in their own lives and in the lives of others?\u00a0 This would lead to both faith sharing (which is itself an acquired skill) and also to endless possibilities for tying scripture to Catholic teaching in a wide variety of areas.<\/p>\n Applying this reasoning to the other things a deacon should know leads to a formation program\u00a0 that is not organized around a \u201ccurriculum\u201d with discrete academic topics (Introduction to the Old and New Testament, Catholic Ethics, Homiletics, etc.) but instead attempts to weave all of these topics together into an organic whole.\u00a0\u00a0 For those familiar with it, the problems and issues involved bear some resemblance to those of the calculus reform movement<\/a> of the past 25 years.\u00a0 And, though I know much less about it, I think there are some connections with Montessori education<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0 Possible?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 Difficult?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Such a program would require an interdisciplinary approach and the rejection (or at least substantive revision) of much received wisdom on education.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But I think deacons educated in this way would be much bettered prepared for their ministries.<\/p>\n What do you think?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past year, since I was dismissed from the diaconate formation program in my diocese, I have been thinking about the way the program was structured.\u00a0 Part of this was selfish:\u00a0 there were pedagogical issues that contributed, I think, to my dismissal.\u00a0 (To date I have never gotten a coherent explanation for why I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2931,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[605],"tags":[1192,1193,1194,1195,1196],"class_list":["post-24951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-cruz-uribe","tag-deacons","tag-diaconate-formation","tag-epistemology","tag-ministry","tag-pedagogy"],"yoast_head":"\n