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Crisis in Theological 
Education
Fake News or a Real Crisis?
By Kris Veldheer, Catholic Theological Union;  Dr. Kelly Campbell, Columbia Theological 
Seminary

ABSTR ACT The presenters used a slide show to explain their research 
into the crisis in theological education. This research was based on an 
extensive review of the literature and used the grounded theory method 
to conduct interviews, to receive qualitative data. Beyond just reporting 
the findings, the presenters also gave attendees a glimpse into the nuts 
and bolts of doing this type of research.

SUMMARY OF PRESENTATION

Based on research into a perceived crisis in theological education, 
we offered some factors based on our review of the literature that 
we thought pointed to an actual crisis in theological education. Two 
of these factors were institutional identity and financial struggles. 
Although in doing our research we found several other studies done 
on similar aspects of this topic, the research gap we identified was that 
no one had done a qualitative study on this topic. Thus, we developed a 
grounded theory study based on the factors we uncovered in the litera-
ture, which led to actual data from the field of theological education. 
Further, we wanted to hear from voices within theological education 
to see if “lived” experience actually matched the literature of the field.

As part of the presentation, we shared the outline for our quali-
tative study, including our initial working explanation. We also took 
session attendees through the nuts and bolts of how we did the actual 
study, such as how we found the participants and how we analyzed 
the interviews. This was important information to share, since it 



Panel Discussions  161

described in part how we reached our outcomes. Likewise, we shared 
the demographics and denominational affiliations of our participants. 

After laying the foundation, the study’s research questions were 
displayed and explained. Included in our explanation were how we 
formed the research questions and some of the changes we anticipate 
making to the questions as we expand our research in Catholic and 
Evangelical seminaries. Finally, we shared the three broad findings 
of our study with those present. Those included outside and inside 
factors, as well as leadership factors. We closed by outlining what we 
learned and the next stages of our research.



162  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Indexing the Theologico-
Political
By Evan Kuehn, Trinity International University; Shawn Goodwin, ATLA

ABSTR ACT Political theology is an important and growing field of 
theological research, which has also attracted the attention of politi-
cal scientists, philosophers, and social theorists. This interest has led 
to different and often ambiguous definitions of what political theology 
actually is. In addition, related subfields like liberation theology, public 
theology, and critical theory are often associated with political theology, 
making categorization challenging. It is important that theological librar-
ians understand the changing terrain of theological-political inquiry in 
order to better provide access for their research communities.

In this paper, we present findings about the range of current descrip-
tion practices for books and journal articles related to political theology. 
We share preliminary explorations in mining cataloged resources for 
subject headings related to political theology, as well as full text of titles 
in HathiTrust for clusters of words that can be modeled as topics. These 
tools can help librarians to better understand the research literature 
they are describing, and engage with it more actively.

INDEXING THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL

Political theology is an important and growing field of theological 
research, which has also attracted the attention of political scientists, 
philosophers, and social theorists. This interest has led to different 
and often ambiguous definitions of what political theology actually is. 
In addition, related subfields like liberation theology, public theology, 
and critical theory are often associated with political theology, making 
categorization challenging. It is important that theological librarians 
understand the changing terrain of theological-political inquiry in 
order to better provide access for their research communities.



Panel Discussions  163

In this paper we share preliminary explorations in mining cata-
loged resources for subject headings related to political theology, as 
well as full text of titles in HathiTrust for clusters of words that can be 
modeled as topics. These tools can help librarians to better under-
stand the research literature they are describing, and engage with it 
more actively.

WHAT IS POLITICAL THEOLOGY?

Part of what makes political theology an interesting test case is how 
variable it can be as a field of study. Political theology often describes 
a number of quite various subfields and methodological approaches. 
We will begin with a short discussion of some of the primary uses of 
the term.

Political theology tends to include some sense of intersectionality 
or interdisciplinarity, which we see signaled in its name as dealing 
with “theology” and “politics.” Cavanaugh and Scott offer this defini-
tion in the introduction to the Blackwell Handbook to Political Theology:

Theology is broadly understood as discourse about God, and 
human persons as they relate to God. The political is broadly 
understood as the use of structural power to organize a soci-
ety or community of people . . . Political theology is, then, the 
analysis and criticism of political arrangements (including 
cultural-psychological, social and economic aspects) from 
the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s ways 
with the world.1

Another commonly quoted definition, from Jan Assmann, also 
highlights the dual aspect of the field by understanding political theol-
ogy as examining the “ever-changing relationships between politi-
cal community and religious order, in short, between authority and 
salvation.”2

On the other hand, political theology is often rooted in political 
practice itself by means of association with a particular political 
stance, context, or end. The primary example of this is liberation 
theology, which might also be associated with contextual theologies 
such as black theology, Mujerista theology, Dalit theology, Minjung 
theology, etc.



164  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Another older example of contextually situated political theology 
is Christian Socialism. This designation was more common at the end 
of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century and often 
corresponds with what we refer to today as political theology. Notably, 
the journal Political Theology began life with the subtitle “a journal of 
Christian socialism,” although it doesn’t include this anymore.

Political theology is also defined in terms of a particular object of 
study, usually one that offers a theological ground for political life: 
sovereignty, authority, glory, legitimacy, etc.

Political theology is also very often engaged with liberalism and 
secularism, because both of these present a situation where the theo-
logical content of political life is not explicit. Political theology is often 
opposed to liberalism and secularism, or presented as a genealogical 
critique of them.

WHY SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT  
POLITICAL THEOLOGY?

First, it is an emerging field. While political theology has been around 
for a while, over the past few decades it has experienced a significant 
surge in publications, new journals, etc. It is important from the stand-
point of collection development librarianship to be aware of important 
new trends in theological fields, and topic modelling and subject head-
ing analysis can assist in better understanding new developments. 

As an interdisciplinary field, political theology often eludes clear-
cut categorization. A good deal of literature that is recognizable as 
political theology does not bear a heading that says as much on the 
title page.  

Important literature in political theology often predates descrip-
tion of them as such. How do we interact with the metadata for these 
items?

CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES

In order to better understand the description of political theology 
literature, we will examine three important controlled vocabularies: 
the Library of Congress Subject Heading Authorities, the ATLA Reli-
gion Database (RDB) subject headings, and subject headings in the 
HathiTrust Collection.



Panel Discussions  165

LCSH AUTHORITIES

The LCSH Authorities provide a helpful diachronic look at description 
practices for political theology because they include the year that each 
subject heading was established. Below are fifteen important subject 
headings for political theology texts. While “Political Theology” itself 
is only added in 1998, important alternative subject headings appear 
in the 1980s, especially “Liberation Theology” and “Religion and Poli-
tics.” Throughout the 1990s, an increase in description of contextual 
theologies related to political theology is notable, and in the 2000s 
this trend continues along with variations (e.g., “in literature” or “and 
race”). “Public Theology” is also recognized as an important subject 
that is in many ways synonymous with political theology.

 • Liberation theology — 1986

 • Secularization (Theology) — 1986

 • Religion and politics — 1986

 • Christian Socialism — 1986

 • Minjung theology — 1989

 • Womanist theology — 1994

 • Mujerista theology — 1996

 • Political theology — 1998

 • Black theology — 2000

 • Christian Sociology — 2003

 • Social Gospel — 2005

 • Liberation theology in literature — 2006

 • Postcolonial theology — 2010

 • Public theology — 2010

 • Political theology and race — 2011

SUBJECT HEADINGS IN THE RELIGION DATABASE

The Religion Database of ATLA provides a unique window into the 
application of these related subject headings to articles and essays 
that are indexed.3



166  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

The general timeline of how the subject headings have been 
applied in to articles published in the various years shows the rela-
tive popularity of the topics in the material of the time. One curiosity is 
that Public Theology was added to the Religion Database before Politi-
cal Theology, which accounts for its greater usage. This is in contrast 
to the LCSH, where Public Theology was added later.

SUBJECT HEADINGS ASSOCIATED WITH  
POLITICAL THEOLOGY

The five most common subject 
headings associated with Political 
Theology in the Religion Database 
are as follows:

 1. Politics and Christianity, 55

 2. Liberation theology, 24

 3. Public theology, 21

 4.  Political science—Philosophy, 19

 5. Schmitt, Carl, 1888-1985, 15

Comparing three of the central political theology headings

An Association Wordcloud for Political 
Theology



Panel Discussions  167

SUBJECT HEADINGS ASSOCIATED WITH  
PUBLIC THEOLOGY

The five most common subject 
headings associated with Public 
Theology in the Religion Data-
base are as follows:

 1. Theology—Methodology, 114

 2. Politics and Christianity, 105

 3. Social ethics, Christian, 77

 4. Church and the world, 73

 5.  Communication (Theology), 49

SUBJECT HEADINGS ASSOCIATED WITH  
LIBERATION THEOLOGY

The five most common subject 
headings associated with Libera-
tion Theology in the religion data-
base are as follows:

 1.  Theology—Methodology, 128

 2.  Theology—Latin America, 112

 3. Poor and the church, 111

 4. Black theology, 110

 5. Theology, Contextual, 98

SUBJECT HEADINGS IN THE HATHITRUST DATA

We created a collection on HathiTrust of nearly 20,000 volumes.4 

These volumes were narrowed down to around 10,000, and then we 
gathered the subject headings from OCLC for this narrower subset. 
Below, we have broken down these volumes into the fifteen most 
common topic headings by year. 

While some subject headings are prominent over all decades (e.g., 
Politics and government, theology), we see “World War, 1914-1918” in 
the literature during the decade after the Great War. Liberation theology 

An Association Wordcloud for Public 
Theology

An Association Wordcloud for Liberation 
Theology



168  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

1900-1919  
59 items

1920-1939  
59 items

1940-1959  
147 items

Literature: 9
Politics and government: 7
Literature —Collections: 6
Literature—Bibliography: 6
World history: 5
Speeches, addresses, etc: 4
Clergy: 3
Philosophy: 3
Encyclopedias and 

dictionaries: 3
Compromise (Ethics): 3
Clergy—United States—

Biography: 2
World politics: 2
Political parties: 2
Political parties—France: 2
Theology: 2

Politics and government: 
8

Encyclopedias and 
dictionaries: 7

Religion: 4
Philosophy: 3
Rhetoric, Ancient: 3
Poetics: 3
World War, 1914-1918: 

2
Civilization: 2
Classical literature: 2
Classical literature—

History and criticism: 2
Church and state: 2
Economic history: 2
Encyclopedias: 2
Protestantism: 2
Church history—20th 

century: 2

Political science: 13
Politics and government: 

11
Encyclopedias and 

dictionaries: 9
Philosophy: 7
Theology: 6
Islamic civilization: 4
Islam: 4
Theology—Periodicals: 4
Education: 4
Philosophy—Periodicals: 4
Kings and rulers: 4
History: 4
Social sciences: 4
Periodicals: 3
Church and state: 3

1960-1979  
1238 items

1980-1999  
4046 items

2000-PRESENT  
2771 items

Political science: 80
Politics and government: 

67
Theology: 53
Theology, Doctrinal: 41
Civilization: 35
Christianity: 31
Political science—History: 

28
Religion: 25
History: 23
Intellectual life: 21
Theologie: 19
Social conditions: 18
Theology—Periodicals: 17
Renaissance: 16
Social sciences: 16

Theology, Doctrinal: 262
Politics and government: 

259
Theology: 136
Liberation theology: 128
Religion: 128
Christianity: 123
Civilization: 110
Political science: 105
Geschichte: 81
Letterkunde: 77
Theologie: 77
Geschichte: 75
Church and state: 68
Christian ethics: 68
Theologie: 65

Politics and government: 
186

Religion: 113
Civilization: 78
Theology, Doctrinal: 71
Christianity: 69
Philosophy: 68
Religion and politics: 62
Political science: 60
Christianity and politics: 59
Theology: 51
Political science—

Philosophy: 49
Intellectual life: 48
Literatur: 48
Religion: 48
Literature: 46



Panel Discussions  169

is quite prominent in titles from 1980-1999, reflecting the same 
patterns as the LCSH and the ATLA database.

TOPIC MODELING

One way of exploring these subject headings and how they can be used 
for understanding the concepts and writing on political theology is 
through topic modeling. A topic model is a machine learning tech-
nique that groups words that commonly appear in the same context 
into a topic. The number of topics that a model fills with these bags of 
words is set in the initial parameters of the model. How many topics 
a researcher uses depends on the scope of the corpus, the length of 
the discrete texts fed into the model (the documents), the desired 
outcome, and the purpose of the model.5 Ideally, the topics should not 
overlap conceptually, nor should they be so broad as to be meaning-
less. For this project,we found that twenty-five topics for the corpus 
that we chose provided some of the most interesting topics. We chose 
thirteen books that cover a broad range of political theology. We also 
set the documents to be around 1,000 words. This provided more 
higher level topics than we anticipated, but it was very illustrative. 

BOOK SELECTION

Here is the list of books we gathered from HathiTrust that we used as 
the basis for our topic model:

 •  Remembering Esperanza: a cultural-political theology for North Ameri-
can praxis—Mark Kline Taylor.

 •  Liberty, dominion, and the two swords: on the origins of Western politi-
cal theology (180-398)—Lester L. Field, Jr.

 • The scope of political theology—edited by Alistair Kee.

 • A reader in political theology—edited by Alistair Kee.

 •  The Church as polis: from political theology to theological politics 
as exemplified by Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas—Arne 
Rasmusson.

 •  The politics of human frailty: theological defence of political liberalism—
Christopher J. Insole.

 •  Perspectives of a political ecclesiology—edited by Johannes B. Metz.



170  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

 •  Liberation theology: human hope confronts Christian history and Amer-
ican power—Rosemary Radford Ruether.

 •  Mysterium liberationis: fundamental concepts of liberation theology—
edited by Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino.

 •  The king’s two bodies: a study in mediaeval political theology—Ernst H. 
Kantorowicz.

 •  A genealogy of the corporation: articulating sovereign power and capi-
talism—Joshua Evdasin Barkan.

 •  Religion and violence: philosophical perspectives from Kant to Derrida—
Hent de Vries.

 •  In search of a global ethics: theological, political, and feminist perspec-
tives based on a critical analysis of JPIC and WOMP—Elisabeth Gerle.

KEY TOPICS AND THEIR CONTENTS

The topic model can be visualized. On the right side, the model 
displays some of the key terms for the model, and on the left side, the 
different topics are modeled to show the relative frequency of the topic 
in the corpus, and a general idea of how closely the topics overlap.6

HathiTrust has extracted features from all of their scanned 
resources, and these sorts of extracted features lend themselves well 



Panel Discussions  171

to topic modeling. It allows the user to get a sense of the contents of a 
work, without reading it.

CONCLUSION

This exploratory study into topic modelling and subject heading anal-
ysis has been undertaken because of how much it can contribute 
to librarians’ understanding of the theological literature, as well as 
their own engagement with it. Especially in the case of a complicated 
field like political theology, difficulties are present on both ends of 
the library ecosystem. When librarians work with patrons, refer-
ence interviews will not always be clear-cut, and the student may not 
even know what topic they need to research within the field of politi-
cal theology. The existing collection, perhaps even archival mate-
rial, includes literature relevant to political theology that often isn’t 
described as such.

On the other hand, the taxonomical problem of understanding 
political theology begins with the task of controlled vocabulary and 
continues into the cataloging process. Political theology is interdis-
ciplinary, broad, ambiguous, and changing, but still differentiable. 

We also believe that there is more work that could be done in utiliz-
ing the tools of topic modeling in librarianship. Topic modeling can 
contribute to the discoverability of relevant items in the catalog. Many 
of the key resources for political theology were written before the 
creation (and widespread usage) of the Subject Heading, yet topic 
modeling can aid in the finding of resources, and even narrow down 
to the page key texts, for the study of a given topic. Topic modeling can 
also supplement metadata creation, when existing subject headings 
are inadequate. By way of anticipation on the part of indexers, topic 
modeling can help to trace potential trends by identifying prominent 
topic clusters that appear in more recent research. These tools and 
methodologies are transferable to other conceptual domains as well. 
We have chosen to focus on political theology because it provides an 
ideal test case, but other subfields of theology and religious studies 
would likewise be worth investigating.



172  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS172  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

NOTES

1 William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Scott, “Introduction,” in The 
Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 
2004), 1.

2  Jan Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie in Altägypten, 
Israel und Europa (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2000), 15. Quoted 
in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds., Political Theolo-
gies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham 
University Press, 2006), 25; translation slightly modified.

3  For all of the code used in the preparation of this, please see 
http://e2dubba.github.io.

4  The collection can be found here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/
cgi/mb?a=listis&c=1154484.

5  Micah Saxton has a helpful introduction to topic modeling: 
https://msaxton.github.io/topic-model-best-practices/.

6  For an interactive version of this model see http://e2dubba.
github.io.

http://e2dubba.github.io
http://e2dubba.github.io
http://e2dubba.github.io

