The ground of higher education is shifting, but learning ecosystems around the world have much more space than MOOCs and trendy online platforms can fill, and Loewen shows how professors have an indisputable pedagogical edge that gives them a crucial role to play in higher education. By adopting the collaborative pedagogical process in this book, professors can create effective social learning experiences that connect students to peers and professional colleagues in real-time. Loewen moves beyond surface questions about technology in the classroom to a problem best addressed by educators in bricks-and-mortar institutions: if students are social learners, how do we teach in a way that promotes actual dialogue for learning? Designing learning experiences that develop intercultural competencies puts the test to students' social inclinations, and engagement with course material increases when it's used to dig deeper into the specificities of their identity and social location. Loewen's approach to inter-institutional collaborative teaching will be explored with examples and working templates for collaborative design of effective social learning experiences.

Many congregations today are beset by fears, whether over loss of members and money, or of irrelevancy in an increasingly pluralistic society. To counter this, many congregations focus on strategy and purposewhat churches "do"but Cheryl Peterson submits that mainline churches need to focus instead on "what" or "who" they areto reclaim a theological, rather than sociological, understanding of themselves. To do this, she places the questions of the church's identity and mission into a conversation with the primary ecclesiological paradigms of the past century: the neo-Reformation concept of the church as a "word event" and the ecumenical paradigms of the church as "communion." She argues that these two paradigms assume a context of cultural Christendom that no longer existsfocused on the church that is gatheredrather than the missional church that is sent out. Peterson suggests instead that we understand the church as a people created by the Spirit to be a community, and that we must claim a narrative method to explore the church's identityspecifically, the story of the church's origin in the Acts of the Apostles. Finally, here is a way of thinking of church that reconciles the best of competing models of church for the future of mainline Protestant theology.