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

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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At least in the United States, social class and its ramifications for spirituality and practice in theology remains a great unspoken category in the academic study of religion and theology. This fear of social class identification, of being pegged to the wrong class, can be manifest as fear of what our students may say about their spiritual lives, what our own social classes have contributed to our own spiritual lives, and what the social class aspirations of our institutions give to or withdraw spiritually from our students. Does the social class into which we are inaugurated as academics provides a built-in tendency to resent those “below” us, including our students, distancing ourselves from them, and disqualifying their subjectivity? I have become aware that my attempts to hold on to practices of secular music culture as substantial practices of the self is a way that I resist shedding the working class habitat and those relationships in which I grew up.

Practice-awareness, then, is a key part of what I do. I have taught undergraduates and graduate students in three Jesuit college and universities over the last eight years. I see no greater service that I can provide as a theological educator than having theological materials work with, through, and on my students and myself in the theaters of higher education. For a class to make a substantial difference in how one relates to oneself and others, in more searching and curious decision-making, in a deeper apprehension of what is at stake in their day to day lives, in their respect for the gorgeous mystery that they are, and bear, and encounter—all these are my goals as a theological educator. Helping a graduate student in ministry in framing a pastoral research project, talking with an undergraduate about theologies of tradition, or trying to calibrate the state of an academic theological question with a doctoral student in theology—for me these ought to be stations on the students’ way to more life, richer desire, “legitimate strangeness”… because they are also relational doors to the minister’s fuller grasp of the contours of a complex pastoral situation, of the undergraduate’s ability to talk to their parents or peers about their religious decisions, and of the doctoral student’s ability to make their way into a conversation, a community, a conference, a career.

But if I am led forward by a sense for trying to work with theology for my students’ freedom to make of their desires a free enough life with and for others, to have the experience of theological education make of their passions a spiritual exercise, I am also shadowed by my sense for the ambiguities, dangers, and destructiveness of Christianity and Christian theology, and in particular Catholicism, Catholic theology, and Catholic education. This is a theological tradition and way of life that, to put it simply, is suffused with courage and cowardice, a beautiful kind of power liturgically, socially, intellectually, and a frightening kind of power liturgically, socially, intellectually. Figuring out that and how this is the case, and allowing this to condition my teaching, have become important tasks for me as a theological educator. So I feel both led and shadowed by what can happen to the life of the spirit in the ecclesial, social and academic cultures of which theology is a part. As a result, I see the question of spirituality as an ethical question for the theological educator, a matter of asking what hand we have in shaping and forming, and toward what, in whose interest. Theological education has a role to play, however modest, in the sometimes irreversible good or damage we have the power to do to each other, individually and communally. As a result of these orientations, I think that being conducted into a particular mode of theological experience is as important for my teaching, even more so, than the clinching of an argument. I take it that formation by the theological cultures represented in education are what make clinching arguments significant for people.

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