For the second year in a row, from April 7–11, 2014, the city of Atlanta hosted the American Lectures in the History of Religions. The lecturer this year was Professor Catherine L. Albanese, the J. F. Rowny Professor Emerita and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Albanese served as the president of the American Academy of Religion in 1994.

“The teaching of theology has not changed to catch up with the new global situation,” writes Kwok Pui-lan in the opening essay in this issue of Spotlight on Theological Education! Interest in this topic was evident at the American Academy of Religion workshop in Baltimore in 2013: “Teaching Theology in the Globalized and Transnational World.” The workshop drew over a hundred attendees, including a significant number of international participants. In her essay, Pui-lan raises challenges and concerns in teaching theology across national, cultural, racial, denominational, linguistic, and religious differences. These concerns include matters of content and process. In addition to examining theological curriculum, Pui-lan asserts that we must pay attention to the “glocal”—“the dialectical relationship between the global and the local.”

This adventure started at a table in a small cubby hole of a traditional Korean restaurant in the maze of streets around Insadong Market in Seoul. A former student introduced me to a friend of his, a history professor at Hanshin Graduate Theological Seminary. The three of us were eating delicious food and talking in two languages, and my friend and former student Pastor Lee was translating a lot of it. Professor Yeon and I did not speak much of each other’s languages, but it soon became clear that we shared many thoughts about the problem of how to frame the history of Christianity narrative so that students from the Pacific world would recognize themselves in it. How do we make the long story of Christianity in this region more than a short section of a final chapter on global Christianity or simply a venue for mission history? Could we teach a course together sometime? Professor Yeon had a sabbatical coming up in a couple of years. He could come to Berkeley. Then two years later, I would come to Seoul. We would teach the same course in both places, bilingually, and see what came out of the experience.

In an era of globalization, one finds it hard to draw a sharp line between the local and the global due to the interconnectivity of our life in the world. In the 1980s, a word emerged to illustrate this connectivity of local and global: glocalized. What people used to perceive as local is now inevitably intertwined with what people traditionally considered global. Everything interrelates with everything else. In this rapidly changing contemporary world, where globalization and neo-imperialism impact the concrete reality of people both within and outside Christianity, at home and abroad, determining how to understand/construct Christianity in terms of its theological education, discourse, and institutional practice in various parts of the world, and how to form a worldly coalition and solidarity, have become more pressing issues than before.