At the end of a semester, or an academic year, or a book, you hope that exhaustion has joined exhilaration, and those to whom you have offered your thinking and dreaming will move forward making beautiful steps of their own. I want to encourage you to make beautiful steps of your own by talking with your colleagues—students, faculty, and administrators—and asking them what things might you all read together, what conversations might you have, and what commitments to dialogue ought you to make. I recommend this rather than send you away from this text with a list of recommended reading, not because I am against further reading. My endnotes included several books worth considering reading, but the most crucial step would be for you to imagine new conversations that open up a shared exploration into the desire for communion that is intended to vivify theological education.
To be involved in theological education is to long for eternity and the end of death. It is to seek the blessed state where our words start to do new work by first joining the chorus of the words of those who live forever in the Lord and who sound the healing and redeeming voice of the living God. Then our words will heal. Then our words will build up. Then our words will help form life together. Then our words will give witness to a destiny only visible through love. Talking together then is a practice aimed at eternity, and it matters more than we often realize for bringing our hope into focus. This finally is the goal of this book and the task I want to leave you with—to bring hope into focus.