theoTREC
For fifteen years, students in Drew’s Master of Divinity program have been traveling around the world with faculty and student peers.
Together, students from many cultures pack their bags and take to the skies (or the road) to fulfill their requirement for an intensive and intentional experience in cross-cultural learning. In the process they also gain a world of insights into their own contexts and perspectives.
Choosing from options as varied as the American Southwest, Turkey, and West Africa, students encounter diverse communities and learn about the values, belief systems, historical experiences, and resources of a culture or context that is not their own. Getting a new perspective on their own lives, students often find their visions of their local ministries and spiritual self-understanding stretched and enlivened. Becoming aware of border crossing interdependences, students expand their commitment to fostering mutual understanding and respect as well as solidarities common cause.
Health care, healing rituals, liberation theology, economic development, politics, inter-religious conflict and dialogue, ecology, women and children, family structures and systems, social justice, and the role of the church in social transformation are but a few of the themes of these courses which fulfill these curricular goals to:
- facilitate a significant and experiential encounter with an unfamiliar culture
- increase knowledge of the diversity of global Christianity and religions
- inspire continued connections with people met and/or social struggles learned about
- enrich current understanding of theology and ministry
- challenge how one views his or her own culture, politics, ethics or theology