There are many disciplinary perspectives from which one can study theology and culture, an intersection that has never, for me, been less than a reckless passion. My own way theologically into this nexus, and thus to the study of rock and theology, has been with the assistance of a domain called “practical theology.” This field is often distinguished from systematic theology, moral theology, historical theology, and fundamental theology (not to mention many other ways of marking up the map of theological studies). Practical theology takes practice as its key conceptual focus, and practices of interest to theology (whether in “religious” or “secular” contexts) as its key reference point — whether as a starting point or as a conclusion to theological argument. Practical theology is not well known in Catholic contexts in the United States, though it is better known in Catholic theological circles elsewhere, for example Canada and Europe. The term “practical theology” was made most effective and critically robust for modern theology by the 18th-19th century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and ever since has been more common in Protestant seminaries and Protestant theological encyclopedias.  Given its rarity in Catholic circles in the United States, I am sometimes asked how I came to learn of it and find it useful. Here is part 1 of my brief account of how.

I was introduced to practical theology through Professor Thomas Groome during my doctoral studies at Boston College in the late 1990s. I had never heard of practical theology during two years of master’s work at Harvard Divinity School, and sometime within my first year of doctoral studies, Professor Groome mentioned the International Academy of Practical Theology and the contours of the discipline while we were talking about my interests in faith and culture, and how to situate those within disciplinary nomenclatures and intellectual alliances/interlocutors. From time to time, he would give me articles by practical theologians, many of them from the International Journal of Practical Theology, particularly because they crossed my own interests in philosophies of practice, continental philosophy, or popular culture studies, as ways of thinking with and for theology in practice. This took place while the content of discussions at the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (now part of the School of Theology and Ministry), where I was located, was still heavily tilted toward religious education.

As these introductions to the discipline were happening, several zones of exploration and personal history were coming together in the late 1990s and early 00s that further helped me feel a productive and promising caughtness in that ambiguous, open-ended, and unruly set of overlapping domains called practical theology:

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On the heels of Mary and Mike’s recent ruminations on her rock addiction and his inquiry into defining “Christian” rock….

Today I’d like to make my own confession. I’m a gear geek. When I go to a show, I’m looking to see what gear the lead guitarist is using to boost his sound during a solo (two TS-9s in tandem always works best, right?). When I listen to an album with a prominent bassline, I try to identify the frequency where the bassist’s compression kicks in, allowing for both a grainy, unmuddled bottom and a smooth, phattened high end (a distinction that is unfortunately washed over in poorly compressed audio files).

This propensity for “geargeekity” also manages to express itself in other spheres beyond the musical. When my academic institution installed a SmartBoard last year, I was eager to use it in seminars. Similarly, when we purchased Adobe CS4, I stayed awake at night thinking of all the possibilities for using Flash animation in teaching. And like everyone else, over the past year I’ve been researching e-readers for their PDF capabilities so I can take my favorite academic journals with me everywhere. (Forget the gear…perhaps I’m just a categorical “geek”!)

Yet last week I attended (more…)

For those who are interested in the teaching of theology in higher education, the American Academy of Religion has just published online an article I wrote titled “Spirituality and Practice in Theological Education.” Dr. John Thatamanil’s introduction to the theme, and a companion article by Dr. John Makransky, can be found here. My article is here.  It was drawn from a paper I gave at the Annual Meeting of the AAR last fall in Montreal, Canada, and pieces of it have appeared earlier here at R&T.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

For those who take an interest in the teaching and learning of theology, I just put this post up at the “In All Things” blog of the Jesuit magazine America, about my undergraduate course at Fordham this term.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

One of the satisfactions of teaching over the long term is the chance to re-visit certain theological questions again and again. Every college course I’ve taught over the last eight-plus years has somehow taken the relationship between Christianities and cultures as a basic theme, and for this new spring semester that will continue to be the case with my courses at Fordham. I still feel as energized by exploring this relationship as I did my first term teaching (at Boston College) in 2001, and still sense its importance for the everyday life of faith, for ministry, and for academic theology, as well as for the cultures that are influenced by those who try to live as Christians.

Two courses in particular will try to see these fields anew: an undergraduate course I’m teaching on practical theology, and a graduate course on research into the practice of faith.

Here is how I describe the focus of the undergraduate course: “Practical theology explores how practices structure Christian life, for the sake of wiser practice. It focuses on making theological sense of ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ practices in the lives of individuals, communities, churches, and cultures. Practical theology is, then, a Christian theology that critically inquires into practices for the sake of more ‘faithful’ practice, and at the same time allows that inquiry to be reflexive, critically interrogating how the Christian tradition understands itself practically. In other words, it brings theology to bear on cultural practices of significance to Christian life in the present, and in that encounter sees theology itself as a culturally and historically contingent and contested practice. In these and other ways, practical theology is a significant and growing domain of theological inquiry today. It is both a specific field within contemporary Christian theology, and a particular perspective through which one can interpret all theology.”

Informed readers will recognize that in this description I have interpreted a discipline that is often seen in the U.S.A. as a very churchy enterprise, and brought out those elements of it that will seem to be most relevant for the undergraduates I expect might take it. (They will get some of the more churchy material along the way.) We will focus on an array of basic methods in practical theology, noting how they show up in practical theologies and also in students’ lives. With undergraduates especially, I end up teaching practical theology as a kind of philosophy of Christian practice, which is not too far from how I myself view its enterprise.

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This is the final part of a 5-part transcript of my paper, “Spirituality and Practice in Theological Education,” given 9 November 2009 at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal, Québec, Canada. Part one is here; two here; three here; four here.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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Given this analysis, if I am asked to talk about how spirituality fits into theological education, I declare myself both passionate and cautious.

I try to do a lot with students indirectly, asking them with various degrees of specificity how various practices in the culture of theological education (readings, discussions, reflections, writing) clarify or complicate their constitutive life practices, how they’re relating, how they might live with themselves and others. I also want to be cautious in traducing dangerous territories of confession. Foucault and his interpreters have taught me that much, and so I try out practices for myself in which I attempt to remain nondominative in how I work with students, keeping a broad lens, keeping my own integrity, trying to show that I respect theirs as well. This is also because I think that in how we work this out, this interaction itself is theological material, it is a kind of theological experience.

I also often focus not only on how the spirituality of students relates to the class, but on the proposed nexus of enticements to spiritual identification in the texts we are reading, as a way of noticing how texts assist in working up a religious identity and practice. I also sometimes teach a “spiritual review” as part of practical theology, asking how one’s theological research sits in one’s spiritual life, and sometimes we use Augustine’s review of his own life works in the Retractations as an inspiration for the task. If we take spiritual practices to be those through which what is most important in our lives passes, we cannot fail to ask how it is that our teaching plays out these practices, what disciplines we are recommending or concealing.

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A brief note on this paper accompanies part one here. Part two is here. Part three, here.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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With many interpreters of our current cultural situation, I see an appreciation for spirituality as a strikingly widespread interest, including and especially among my students and those with and to whom they theologize and minister. One need not reduce the many faces of spiritual self-identification to one definition to appreciate that for many reasons, many of our students want to taste the meaning of their relationship to what might claim them, a wanting that tends to have students looking for ways of overcoming religious divisions, of articulating shared ethical commitments, and of putting things together in a practical way that makes sense for their immediate felt relationships. (It is important to note that not all research bears this out, such as the recently-published book by Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford, 2009)). There are critics and endorsers of this turn to spirituality, but I think that an attention to practices helps us hold this research, and relate in theological education to our students, in a promising way. Unfortunately, some of the literature on the popular practice of spirituality lacks interest in practice models in theology, focusing much more on what young adults do and do not “know about their faith” or “their religion,” the frequently-condemned scourge of religious illiteracy.

That spirituality is now typically formed and informed, even transformed, outside religious institutions; and secular music plays a substantial role in the formation of identity and spiritual navigation for many if not most young adults in the West and in the Western-influenced globe. Robert Wuthnow’s recent research on generational differences in American religious and spiritual practice found that with regard to the arts, “the most notable generation gap is in preference for contemporary pop/rock music. Nearly four-fifths of young adults in their twenties say they especially like it; fewer than one-fifth of adults age 65 and older do.” Other kinds of music, such as classical and country, are generally favored more by older adults than by younger adults. This includes those who especially like Christian music and gospel music” (Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 130). Moreover, according to Wuthnow, music is the second-most popular source for finding spiritual answers today (after the Christian tradition). It fell to one respected Catholic commentator recently to render public what many scholars themselves in the AAR have already shown, that today’s students of theology are “usually far more catechized by pop culture than by the church,” (John Allen, “Navigating the Future of Theology,” National Catholic Reporter, 14 November 2008, p. 2a ) and the form of pop culture that seems to be most widespread and influential in everyday Western life is secular music (see Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians, and Their Art (Belknap/Harvard, 2008)).

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In this post, I continue the text of the paper I gave at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Part One is right here.

For me, it makes sense to talk about spirituality as implicated in theology, or, as I would rather say, spiritual or theological practices as some of the most basic material of theological cultures.

In dialogue with Michel Foucault’s works, I understand theologically significant practices as the way we are governed and govern ourselves with reference to God, insofar as power circulates through how and what we can know about ourselves and our world, through practices (as distinct, for example, from simply “ideas”), producing the world of identity, relationship, responsibility and obedience—with reference to God—which we then most often take to be simply given. In a deep sense, the very “organization of our practical knowledge” (Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Éditions Gallimard, 1972), English translation: Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 117), our forms of perception, the experience we have of ourselves and others, and the categories we employ for that experience, are historically constituted through power-saturated practices, making us subject to the institutions that support and are supported by regnant forms of knowledge in particular times and places.

(I take practical theology to be that theology focusing on the constitution of practice in a critical account of theological knowledge, for the sake of testing how theology can make critical and reflexive sense of practice in faith and culture.)

With Ilsetraut Hadot and Pierre Hadot, I look for the ways in which Christian theology works as a philosophy, a way of thinking allied to a way of life, an intellectual orientation grounded in and leading onto formations of self and community. With Foucault, I cultivate a critical curiosity about how practices get a spiritual registration and how those practices are dynamic forces of power stitching knowledge and subjectivity in particular situations.

But if I am to be reflexive regarding how my own theological life came to consider these things as meaningful, I should also ask myself about the configurations of practice that gave rise to my susceptibility to being convinced of the placement of spiritual practice in theological education. It is not just my theological training (at Harvard Divinity School and Boston College) or particular religious upbringing (as a Midwestern white Catholic with a middle class ecclesial life and working class neighborhood life), although these have been of course crucial. There is indeed another field of spiritualish practices that have overlapped with my upbringing and theological training to bring me to this field of vision: my immersion in secular music culture, in particular the last twenty-five years of my life as a fan of rock music and as a musician. In secular music cultures of fandom and performance, there are learned ways of disciplining oneself and others, and of being disciplined, of being trained in desires and manifesting desires, of refiguring relationships through shedding what was too small in my and others’ experience. It is no less ambiguous than the theological cultures of higher education or the church, but formative nonetheless. Maintaining the practices of rock culture is also a way of staying in touch with the working class spaces of the world in which I grew up, checking the incitement to class aspiration and concomitant avoidance of our practice-based contingency that is all but demanded by the normative practices of the academy.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

I will paste up a multi-part series of posts on the recent paper I delivered, “Spirituality and Practice in Theological Education,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The AAR is the premier professional scholarly organization for researchers and teachers in the academic study of religion in North America. Nearly five thousand attended this most recent Annual Meeting. A few weeks back, I posted details here about the session in which this paper was given.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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I begin with two examples of experimenting with an awareness of spirituality and spiritual practice in theological education.

I teach a graduate course at Fordham University called “Theology of Ministry.” Recently, students in the class wrote their first paper of the semester, on the relation of their theology of ministry to the religious needs of secular persons as articulated by Charles Taylor and Talal Asad. In reading their papers, I thought the writing was being guided too much by their embrace of or resistance to the mechanics of the paper assignment, or the demanding texts. It didn’t feel “lived in” enough in the way of which I knew they were capable if only they had a different metric for imagining their writing. I encouraged them to think of their academic theological writing as a spiritual exercise, to place their intellectual work as savorable within their spiritual life and practice. So I drew up and discussed with them some brief reflections on making of theological writing an act of theological care for self and others, on living discerningly with sources of knowledge about practice (texts, ministry, life).

In another course I teach, “Foundations of Practical Theology,” we were discussing work on multiple religious belonging by Frank Clooney, and one of my students, from Hong Kong, spoke of attempts to live a sense of dual citizenship politically (Asian and American) and religiously (Buddhist and Christian). The comment, near the end of class, seemed to move the class to a moment of wonderment and deeper curiosity. I suggested that we could end class, for those who wanted to stay, by listening together to a song by Sheila Chandra, the English musician of Indian heritage, a former pop star who now crafts solo vocal music by pulling musics together creatively from her personal and cultural history. One song called “Sacred Stones” has her chant-singing over a drone “Vishnu, Vishnu” alternately with “Dominus Illuminatio Mea, Alleluia.” I was able to find it quickly on YouTube on the classroom computer and played it over the sound system to conclude the class. My idea was to evoke a space for present and future processing, in which the difficult concepts of the Clooney article could be held. The song went over class time, but no students left. Most seemed charmed, moved, or curious.

In reflecting on how theological education ought to be carried out in the light of the academic and popular turn to spirituality, I would like to propose that three questions come to the fore:

[1] First, about the professor’s potentially spiritual practices: What practices do I have to offer as a theological educator, and how is it that those practices come to constitute the potential action domain of my educating?

[2] Second, about my students’ lives: What are the practices that help hold life together for my students?

[3] Third, how might professorial practice and student practice meet each other for the sake of a freeing study of theology? Though all three can rarely be addressed adequately in theological education, I think that responses to all three questions—however implicit—crucially shape what we and our students make of theological education.

Part of the pleasure of dilating rock and theology together is not only thinking through the words these cultures produce, but taking in new symbolic overlaps between them: musical, visual, and more. Here is a video in which Beck, the pop music tinkerer who stitches together sounds from multiple genres into a patchwork rock that most always ends up celebrating groove and country flavors together, is overlaid with Sheila Chandra, who for me is akin to Sinead O’Connor in her celestial ascents through the hierarchies of vocality and bold spiritual experimentation. Just yesterday in a course I teach at Fordham, my students and I listened to Chandra’s “Sacred Stones,” from her Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices album, in which she chant-sings both “Vishnu, Vishnu,” and “Dominus Illuminatio Mea, Alleluia,” bringing together Hindu and Christian meditations in one song.

Here is Chandra singing “Ever So Lonely / Eyes / Ocean” (also from the Weaving album) over Beck’s “Loser” (from the album Mellow Gold).

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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