This is part 2 of my reflection on a review of a recent “drone” music concert in New York City. Part 1 is here.

Now for further reflection:

In the process of his review, Ratliff explores meanings of sounds that take one into humming ruminations on essentials: musically we call these “drones,” but in theology they are, in a sense, the whole game, because theology is no more and no less than a humming rumination on essentials. We can explore such “droning” by theologically overhearing music reviews, and musically overhearing theological works, which are two ways of relating theology to music.

Consider Ratliff’s opening reflection: “There’s an irreducible element of music that connects metal, industrial music, power electronics and classical minimalism, and no word exists for it.”

Stay with that for a while. And then onto the next sentence:

“It involves deep pulsations; excited provocation through sound and concept more than traditional technique; low-end frequencies rarely encountered in life; long sustained tones enlarged through overdrive; or distortion or just force of hands on instruments.”

The kind of theology I write and teach often falls within the domain of “practical theology,” in which it is emphasized that whatever is worthy of being called “theological” must be “experienceable” by people. I stand by that, so long as what it means is carefully interpreted, but Ratliff’s meditation on (more…)

I am in Atlanta, Georgia, for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, an annual gathering of several thousand scholars of religion from North America and around the world. Over four days, we discuss and debate new research related to almost any religion you’ve ever heard of, and many you probably never have. (Seven of us from Rock and Theology are here, as well, and the project was advanced significantly this weekend after a good meeting yesterday in conjunction with our patron, Liturgical Press. More news on that in the future.)

I heard a particularly good paper yesterday in a session sponsored by the Association of Practical Theology (disclosure: I’m on the exec committee and helped plan the session), a session that looked at what research in wise/excellent practice has to say to practical theology. Practical theology often focuses on the cultivation of ways of life and/or pastoral practices that generate, instantiate, or exemplify theological material (concepts, values, narratives), and so learning from research in other fields studying how practices (are presumed to) become stronger, more coherent, or more excellent gives something of potential importance to practical theology.

In this session, John Falcone, a doctoral student at Boston College, gave a paper on the difference that the social class of the theologian makes as theologians (as those with presumably “high cultural capital”) get removed, through practices of cultivation of educated taste, from the poor and working classes (with presumably “low cultural capital”) and are unable to theologize in ways that are drawn from or speak to persons in those social classes. He used the social theory of sociologist-philosopher Pierre Bourdieu to describe how persons are formed to have certain tastes in and through the palette of what is possible and desirable in one’s social class.

I think this is a very important line of thinking to advance.

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Following on from part one of this topic…

In terms of my induction to practical theology, then, as time went by in graduate school, I understood the pastoral theological works I had been reading (whether liturgy, pastoral care and counseling, religious education, spiritual direction, and other theologies of church practice) as attempts at managing faith identity through the production and maintenance of Catholic knowledge and the governance of subjectivity—however “traditional” or “progressive.”

The more I “got” this perspective, the more I intensified my immersion in Foucault studies, due among other things to their rich complexities of debate about cultural practices there. That turn let onto an ongoing overhearing of contemporary continental philosophy in my work. I see philosophies of practice and cultural studies of practice as essential traveling companions for the practical theologian. Since then, my pursuit of the theory and practice of everyday life, my continued activity in “secular” rock music, and my sense for theology as a psychagogic-political activity for the theologian, her students, and further audiences well beyond original imagining, position me to both engage the history and present of practical theology, and to attempt to show its interventionist and illuminative significance with respect to the small stable of questions with which I deal at the “intersection” of theology and culture.

Joining these foci to the diverse concerns internationally for practice in practical theology, and especially the emerging interest in cultural in addition to ecclesial practices for theology, and the slow but (I hope) sure turning to cultural theories and practices in practical theology, has helped me see the power that a practical-theological orientation might have.

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There are many disciplinary perspectives from which one can study theology and culture, an intersection that has never, for me, been less than a reckless passion. My own way theologically into this nexus, and thus to the study of rock and theology, has been with the assistance of a domain called “practical theology.” This field is often distinguished from systematic theology, moral theology, historical theology, and fundamental theology (not to mention many other ways of marking up the map of theological studies). Practical theology takes practice as its key conceptual focus, and practices of interest to theology (whether in “religious” or “secular” contexts) as its key reference point — whether as a starting point or as a conclusion to theological argument. Practical theology is not well known in Catholic contexts in the United States, though it is better known in Catholic theological circles elsewhere, for example Canada and Europe. The term “practical theology” was made most effective and critically robust for modern theology by the 18th-19th century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and ever since has been more common in Protestant seminaries and Protestant theological encyclopedias.  Given its rarity in Catholic circles in the United States, I am sometimes asked how I came to learn of it and find it useful. Here is part 1 of my brief account of how.

I was introduced to practical theology through Professor Thomas Groome during my doctoral studies at Boston College in the late 1990s. I had never heard of practical theology during two years of master’s work at Harvard Divinity School, and sometime within my first year of doctoral studies, Professor Groome mentioned the International Academy of Practical Theology and the contours of the discipline while we were talking about my interests in faith and culture, and how to situate those within disciplinary nomenclatures and intellectual alliances/interlocutors. From time to time, he would give me articles by practical theologians, many of them from the International Journal of Practical Theology, particularly because they crossed my own interests in philosophies of practice, continental philosophy, or popular culture studies, as ways of thinking with and for theology in practice. This took place while the content of discussions at the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (now part of the School of Theology and Ministry), where I was located, was still heavily tilted toward religious education.

As these introductions to the discipline were happening, several zones of exploration and personal history were coming together in the late 1990s and early 00s that further helped me feel a productive and promising caughtness in that ambiguous, open-ended, and unruly set of overlapping domains called practical theology:

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