Nurturing the Next Generation of Scholars

Thelathia “Nikki” Young, M. Div, Th.M

Doctoral Candidate - Ethics and Society, Graduate Division of Religion
FTE Doctoral Fellow ('10)

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June 14, 2010

FTE: Leading Paradigm Shifts by Interrogating Leadership

As it is always on the cutting edge – making space for new scholars, engaging esteemed faculty, and unapologetically re-shaping the space of the religious academy – FTE has once again found an opportunity to point emerging (and beginning) scholars of religion and theology into a critical and apropos dialogical interrogation.  By acquiring a new moniker for the summer gathering of doctoral students and faculty, this fellowship program has simultaneously instigated several questions and challenged the ways that we might have uncritically approached them. 

The 2010 FTE Leaders in the Academy Conference centers on the theme, “Theological Education and African American Religious Leadership: New Paradigms, Perspectives and Paradoxes.”  Embedded in the title of the conference and in its theme are a few important questions.  What is religious leadership?  Whose perspectives are shaping and being shaped by religious leadership? What critical encounters – and possible conflicts – are present because and irrespective of religious leadership? And, most interesting to me: What types of persons, orientations, and temporal-spatial contexts are made possible through religious leadership?

I am enlivened by these types of questions for several reasons, three of which I will name here.  First, I like the idea that FTE invites us to the process of figuring out what we mean by leadership as a term that gets used in academic, ecclesial, and community space.  Before focusing on who is leading or where we are being led, in the first instance, we ought to be concerned with the process of leading – the means by which it occurs – and the transformative substance of its approach to individual and social agency.  In short, how does religious leadership relate to the business of being humanly agential, socially accountable, and individually freeing?

Second, I appreciate the cyclical praxis that is implied by the questions.  At the outset, leadership seems to possess more than directive and constructive intentions.  It is also representative of the important dynamic of humble reception, and as such, it points to possibilities for being a site of transformation itself.  In short, as religious leadership participates in the process of shaping people, interests, moods and motivations, it also becomes a necessary product of those characters, values, and circumstances that it affects.  Thus, I’m glad to be forced to think through the possibilities for religious leadership that become evident as we make room for it to be as shaped and transformed as we are.

Third and most relevant to my own intellectual agenda, FTE’s interrogation of religious leadership situates it as an unstable category of identification, action and production.  Fortunately, we have room in our treatment of religious leadership as an unstable category to do the ethical work of translating, redacting, and revolutionizing what we assume is at its foundation.  That is, we live into the freedom of shaking the dust from our leader-feet and, instead, planting ourselves in the generative soil of an unstable notion of leading.  This, I believe, is at the crux of a shifting paradigm of religious leadership.