Academics
Field Education at Nashotah House
What Field Education is Designed to Do:
The Field Education program at Nashotah House derives from the vision of theological education/priestly formation offered in the currentACADEMIC CATALOG:
Nashotah House is committed to theological education and ministerial (esp. priestly) formation grounded in the Anglican ethos and shaped by the Benedictine charism. The goal of all degree programs at Nashotah House, then, is the student’s formation in a habitus fidei (a faithful character), an intellectus fidei (a faithful understanding), and a praxis fidei (a faithful practice). Students will emerge with an understanding and love of the Christian tradition and a growing ability to live and minister in the light of its truth and beauty.
Field Education most closely relates to the development of a praxis fidei and seeks to provide the integration point whereby a student goes from knowing about theology to being able to do theology within a specific ministry situation.
The Master of Divinity Program Goals provide additional insight into what undergirds our understanding of Field Education at Nashotah House.
Faithful Praxis (praxis fidei): MDiv graduates should show themselves capable practitioners in the following respects:
- Inspire a passion for the Great Commission and lead the church to bring the gospel directly to bear on the lives, the culture, and the conditions of all peoples;
- Exercise effective leadership in the family, parish and the wider church;
- Employ the biblical languages and a coherent hermeneutic toward faithful and compelling biblical exegesis;
- Construct and deliver preaching and teaching in which the Scriptures are opened, the Gospel proclaimed, the people edified and God exalted;
- Lead God’s people in public worship, faithfully administering the sacraments, fully appropriating the wealth, the wisdom and the disciplines of the Catholic Tradition;
- Provide godly counsel, pastoral care and spiritual direction, caring for the whole person and guiding in spiritual development;
- Catechize the people, equipping the saints to make disciples and teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded. (p. 28)
The foregoing demonstrates that Theological Field Education is an intentional use of ministry experience as a learning opportunity. This approach combines experience, service and employment, with the primary emphasis on the student’s development as a person and as a minister. The Carnegie Foundation’s Educating Clergy demonstrates that theological education at its most effective utilizes the “three apprenticeships,” cognitive, practical and normative. While theological field education has elements of all three, and is really summative of them, it shows its greatest effect in the normative apprenticeship. As Lawrence Golemon points out, “…the normative apprenticeship shapes individual students into the habits, dispositions, and values of the profession, so these habits become authentically their own.” What is being engaged here is the intentional formation of the student into loving God, neighbor, parish and world and thus becomes the seal of the threefold apprenticeship in producing the pastoral or priestly identity. What Nashotah House understands in terms of the habitus fidei, intellectus fideiand praxis fidei, can be also described, as Golemon does, as “the formation into a comprehensive way of knowing, doing, and being in the world that marks a profession.”
For more information on the Field Education program please contact:
Rev. Steven A. Peay, PhD
Director of Field Education
Office: 262-646-6512
Email: SPeay@nashotah.edu
To apply to be a Field Education Site:
All sites must first complete the Nashotah House Field Education Site Application. The Field Education Application can be accessed here.
