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.

The section to which I was asked to pay particular attention is within Part Four, “The Discipline: Defining History and Context in Guild and Global Setting.” (I apologize in advance to all the authors who are here today whose work I cannot adequately characterize in a very short response.) But I am focused especially on Section One, “Issues, Contexts, and Perspectives” concerning practical theology within the guild. The topics circulate around powerful social forces: racism, heterosexism, colonialism, classism, disablism, and Christian-centrism. Miller-McLemore explains that “each [of these topics] was chosen specifically because it has had a huge and destructive impact on human society and on individuals. As a quintessentially modern discipline invested in everyday religion, practical theology has been acutely attentive to these issues.”

I was particularly interested to read this part of the book, because these topics are important ways into appreciating practical theology, given how each matter is so trenchant, theologically saturated in history and concept, and timely. And while it is true that these individual practical theologian authors have been acutely attentive to these issues, I was struck by how in almost every chapter, the author underscores how little work practical theologians have actually attempted or accomplished in these areas.

(Dale Andrews states that “direct attention to race is still in its early stages.” Jeanne Hoeft relates that “practical theologians have just begun to consider… heteronormativity,” and practical theology has “almost no queer-identified texts…” Melinda McGarrah Sharp says that practical theology “has not grappled adequately with postcolonial theory.” John Swinton shows how the ground in theologies of disability has been plowed elsewhere in systematics and ethics. Kathleen Greider argues that religious plurality has “languish[ed] in the background” of Christian practical theology.The only exception is Joyce Mercer’s chapter on classism, in which she argues that “[p]ractical theology is in the midst of a significant shift, not only in terms of how many of its scholars now address [class] in our work, but also in the variety of ways we do so.”)

With the exception of Mercer, the authors in this section argue that practical theology stands to learn primarily from other disciplines, and from there to draw implications for practical theology today. It is hard to avoid the impression that there is some serious self-examination to be done on the part of practical theologians about where we have been and where we are going on the fundamental social and ecclesial diseases of our age. But even in this, each of the chapters very helpfully focuses on the strong suits that practical theologians bring to further address each topic, and show why the field cannot proceed without strong development in each of these areas.

(For example, to racism, practical theology brings a strong history of pastoral theology and liberation theology in church practice and academic reflection; to heteronormativity, practical theology brings the learnings of a rich literature on violence against women; for postcolonialism, a commitment to an inductive approach to theology, an opening to postcolonial psychologies, an understanding of practice as a tensive phenomenon, and an openness to intercultural care practices. For disablism, practical theology has a mutual critical correlation model that helps round out approaches that tend to unnecessarily privilege either experience or the tradition. For Christian-centrism, practical theology can find its way naturally into studies of “lived religious pluralism.”)

In these chapters, the volume sets an agenda for future research in practical theology; graduate students can start here to move the field forward, more established scholars can use this section as a touchstone for self-examination about sins of omission and commission as well as our relationship to growing edges in the field.

Speaking more broadly about the volume, I would make a few observations about how practical theology is construed. First, I am wondering about the apologetic character of much of practical theology, by which I mean the tendency in much of our work to give the impression that Christianity is a religion, that our work is to urge people into Christian discipleship, and that we more or less have our basic coordinates in the faith. I wonder how much room there is for a more critical and historically rigorous account of Christian origins and discourses, and whether we are willing to see practical theology’s fate as tied more strongly to the adventures of contemporary research in historical studies, cultural studies, and philosophy of religion. Christianity is a relatively unmarked category in practical theology. Moreover, most of the Christianity is of the Protestant-inflected sort, and as Greider argues, most of the practical theology is of the Christian sort without wondering whether practical theology is something over which Christians do not have ownership. (To quote Greider, “The momentous question of whether practical theology is an inherently Christian phenomenon or might have resonance with other religions has not yet been broached in the literature.”)

I am intrigued by the book’s closing section that names specific Christian traditions: Liberal Protestant, Evangelical, Pentescostal, and Catholic, and wonder if these will now become ways of qualifying practical theology. And speaking from a Catholic educational context, practical theology as a whole is going to have to be more careful about the language of “subdisciplines” as it moves into Catholic contexts. The subdisciplines language probably needs to be marked as a Protestant practical theology concept and reproblematized. The Catholic scene in the USA may be much more resistant to this language because the “subdisciplines” are well-established independent areas.

I also am aware of the changing economic and labor situation of the academy since the productive span charted by this volume began. It is hard for me to think about the state of the field reflected in this volume without thinking about the labor conditions, at least in the USA, that make possible the maintenance of that field. I have been reading this book while I have been involved with Occupy Wall Street. As I read this volume, I am thinking of the absence, in most of our official practical theological discourse, of the conditioning factor of the workplace and the workforce on the identity and performance of the theologian today. Why so many of us who do this work for a living find the growing gap between the securely academically employed and the insecurely employed a deep concern, why so many of us find the pace or the load or the expectations or the resources for being an academic worker to be not life-giving, and so few have found that vaunted quality called “work-life balance,” and why this felt structure of academic labor, which makes up so much of our unofficial conversation, should put us in intimate solidarity with all who are bound up in our local economies of theological knowledge, seeing ourselves as academic workers alongside an in solidarity with foodservice and janitorial workers, having practical theology arise from a more truthful, integrative labor position, which is also a more class-aware position that would include as crucial, race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality, and more. As Joyce Mercer reminds us in this volume, “Difficulties and resistance to acknowledging our own class positionings’ effects on our scholarship will likely continue until the field lays claim to a more adequate and reflexive discourse that shows how these issues ‘act back’ on our scholarship.” My remarks here were occasioned by my wonderment that we have a whole section on everyday practices, written by academic workers, but in which “working” never becomes an explicit topic for consideration.

Speaking of theological labor, I conclude by returning to the deep importance of this volume for all who care about practical theology. Bonnie Miller McLemore’s incredible theological labor, in partnership with the imagination and sacrifice of dozens of authors among us, and centuries of theologians before us, should allow us feelings of connection and of gratitude. Thank you, Bonnie, for your remarkable dedication to, and leadership of, a project that is a watershed for practical theology: a labor of love, intellectual daring, and heady faith that will point the way for years to come.

Tom Beaudoin, Fordham University

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