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

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