For those who are interested in practical theology, here are my remarks from a session on an important new compendium (600+ pages) on practical theology, given at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco this past Sunday. I was on a panel reviewing the book, alongside Professors Serene Jones (Union Theological Seminary), and Emilie Townes (Yale University), moderated by Dale Andrews (Vanderbilt University), with Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Vanderbilt), the book’s editor, as respondent.

Remarks on The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, edited by Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

This is an extraordinary book that captures a rich conversation in progress. To work through this book is to have the consolation of seeing contours and shapes and dynamisms of that unruly octopus called practical theology that were previously inchoate, obscure, or only rumored.

The many authors are going to be well-known to anyone who has done even minimal reading in practical theology, and represent mostly the intense wave of development that has taken place in the last twenty years, and especially in the last ten. As Miller-McLemore states in her introduction, we need “to review and appraise practical theology as a major area of Christian study and practice [because] [f]resh conceptions of practical theology have grown to such an extent that there is a serious need to clarify its emerging uses and contributions.” Miller-McLemore’s introduction is a crisp tour de force that ranges deftly over the major movements of the past few decades leading to this moment in practical theology, and could only have been written by someone who not only has a grasp of the many simultaneous directions of growth going, but who, by deep involvement, has a hard-earned and graciously rendered intuitive sense for what is really going on. A major part of the volume’s unique contribution is its structuring according to Miller-McLemore’s four-part definition of practical theology: as a scholarly discipline, an everyday activity of faith, a theological method, and a curricular area in seminary education constituted by the “subdisciplines”. This definition and structure will help focus the conversation about what does and does not join these four dimensions, what makes them all practical theology.

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