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.

Sometimes things get bolder and more deliberate. At Boston College and Santa Clara, after many undergraduates asked me about linking their spiritual practices to theological study, we formed a group called Young Theologians, a group of about ten students who met with me regularly for a few years for prayer, conversation, retreat, and independent studies. These students have since gone on to Wall Street, medicine, ministry, and especially graduate school in theology. Also in concert with undergraduates, I was motivated to help them create “theology internships” at Santa Clara University in which they joined summer graduate school studies in theology to ministry training. And at Fordham last year, in response to student practices, we held a session on Ignatian spirituality and sexual decision-making.

The placement of spiritual practice as fundamental materials of theological (and secular musical) cultures sometimes demands rethinking institutional practices. A proposal I drew up at Santa Clara for a “Manresa year” of reading and meditation for a few students – no work allowed! – after completing their undergraduate studies, died almost immediately; another proposal, inspired by my working class students who are almost entirely unable to major in theology due to family, work and social pressures, and who generally lack the leisure for the forms of attention that can make theology so compelling, a proposal in which I argued that all the Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States should, in face of the spiritual-intellectual debilitations that crippling student debt has introduced, pledge to return to their original commitment of being free-tuition institutions—this proposal has not yet been picked up. This turn to spirituality, then, does not have to make theological education less politically invested.

A Summary, in Three Self-Admonitions to Which I Often Return

First, see desires as the most significant curriculum in theological education.

My primary task is to teach for a depth of existential engagement in my students that will be both freeing for them in some small way now, and useful for later appropriation of our studies in their lives. This means that I see the curriculum, essentially, as consisting in their desires as worked through in their/our (culturally-situated) practices. From this pedagogical perspective, I must join the theological content of my courses to that curriculum in such a way that theology becomes employable as a metal detector of sorts, that students can “sweep” across their lives, questions, and cultural engagements so as to help unriddle their placement in the world with the assistance of a theological sounding. Of course, I must also teach them how to take apart and repair the equipment, not to mention showing how different equipment will “register” or “locate” different treasures, dangers, and underground phenomena.

Desires are not the same as literacy. It is interesting to me that the concern for spirituality arises at the same time as the concern for theological/religious literacy and that they are often found together. Theological literacy is often about how the other of the scholar does not know what the scholar does. One hundred years from now, scholars will taxonomize the ways we have of expressing our dismay at how little students know about religion, how remarkable their failures of critical thinking, how trite their knowledge of other traditions, how uninterested they are in true argument. Still, I have yet to read a discussion of the topic that argues that the professor also has a certain theological illiteracy: of their students’ theologies and the methods that would allow a comprehension of them. Are we positioned to experience students richly enough as engaging in theological acts or practices?

But how can there be an appreciation of the force of student desires in theological education without a concomitant question about faculty desires, and the spiritual atmospheres of the institutions in which we work, especially as impacted by the practices that express the aspirant social class proffered by the institution? It does not seem to me we have ways of registering the incitement to aspirant social class in the ways we define and reward success in academic life. The employment process, reappointment, tenure, promotion—they typically have built in naturalizations, rarely problematizations, of academic practice.

Second, try to notice the operative sources of theology.

The question introduced by spirituality in the teaching of theology foregrounds the question of where theology or theological experience comes from. If one wants to account for theological difference and production, especially to understand better why we are susceptible to some theological schools and arguments more than others, and how that susceptibility can be more fully appreciated in theological education, we ought consider “extrarational”, “nonrational”, “nonconceptual” influences. This is why it is helpful to read accounts of how theologians actually come to their beliefs and practices, instead of seeing the operations of theology as only, say, debates about concepts between schools. This is why there is value is taking this question of the role of the spiritual in theology to such books as Shaping a Global Theological Mind (Ashgate, 2008), edited by Darren Marks, or interviews with theologians (probably an underdeveloped genre in theology as compared, say, with contemporary philosophy). This is in order to get a richer grasp of where theology comes from in practice, including spiritual practice, for the sake of integrating this into our teaching.

Third, find allies in theological comprehension of practice.

This turn opens us to new relations with campus ministry professionals, and why not? This turn opens systematicians and practical theologians to a potential new era of work together which is quite significant. And this turn provides an opportune time for theological educators to get in touch with specialists in practice, from all religiously-related disciplines: systematicians, church historians, ethicists, certainly, but also pastoral care and counseling, pastoral and practical theologies, religious or Christian education, spiritual direction, and all the scholarly domains that have never forgotten that the question of formation belongs in theological education, and for whom an “enlightenment after the enlightenment” is not a new question.

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