Invitation to Research in Practical Theology

Zoë Bennett, Elaine Graham, Stephen Pattison, Heather Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138478541
• eBook ISBN: 9781351068222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Practical theology as a subject area has grown and become more sophisticated in its methods and self-understanding over the last few decades. This book provides a complete and original research primer in the major theories, approaches and methods at the cutting-edge of research in contemporary practical theology. It represents a reflection on the very practice of the discipline itself, its foundational questions and epistemological claims. Each chapter examines different aspects of the research process: starting with experience and practice, aspects of research design and epistemology, communities of learning, the influence of theological norms and tradition on the practice of research, and ethical considerations about what constitutes 'the good' in advanced research.

The uniqueness of this book rests in its authoritative overview of current practical theological research across a range of traditions and approaches, combined with a comprehensive introduction to research methodology. It offers worked examples from the authors, their colleagues and research students that serve to illustrate key ideas and approaches in practical theological research.

The four authors are all internationally-leading scholars and rank amongst the most influential figures in practical theology of their generation. The book promises to be of interest to students, teachers and researchers in practical theology, especially those looking to conduct original practice-based enquiry in the field.

1
Locating Ourselves

Starting where we are

Practical theological research is rooted and grounded in the contemporary material and embodied world. This type of research attends to the text of the present as well as to theological traditions. It takes the present moment and the complexity of contemporary bio-social reality as an important locus theologicus, a place where theology is constructed and understood in the light of divine reality. Religious and theological practices, insights and truths are mediated through contemporary social and material realities; they are generated for and by people seeking better to understand faith and action.

That being so, the people who undertake practical theological research work are themselves integrally and reflexively bound up with the kinds of insights and theologies they produce in practice and in theory (Cahalan and Mikoski, 2014, pp. 6–7). There is no view from nowhere, no theology or research finding that does not have a human, with a context and perspective, behind or within it. So, as authors of this book, we need to be as clear as we can about our starting points and assumptions so readers can locate us and see exactly where we are coming from in our approaches to research.

In this chapter, then, we take you into our shared and separate practical theological research worlds to provide a series of insights into the nature of practical theological research as we understand and try to practise it. We do this using two different, but complementary, means. First, we each individually locate ourselves and some of our concerns and contributions in practical theological research via personal narratives of engagement. Who are we? How did we get involved in practical theology, and in practical theological research? What are our passions and concerns? Why do we believe that practical theological research is worth undertaking? What have we gained from, and offered to, the research endeavour? These are some of the questions that will allow readers to evaluate the nature and worth of our approach to practical theology, and to see the kinds of research that we ourselves engage in. It will also enable you to infer the continuities, similarities and differences between us in terms of commitments, interests and methods. Practical theological research is pluralistic and variegated. We don’t all do the same things to the same extent.

Having introduced and located ourselves in practical theological research in selective, discursive narratives, we then try to express the key preoccupations and synergies that characterise the kind of research that we are commending here in a more abstract way. To do this, we set out a series of seven brief key theses about the character of practical theological research. This terse expression of the assumptions that we both hold in common and commend as key to our approach to practical theological research will reveal the sorts of approaches to research we value. They may, or may not, embody useful insight and wisdom, but at least by the end of the chapter you should have a clear understanding of the nature and types of practical theological research expounded and adumbrated in the remaining chapters of this book. And you will also have seen, via the use of both narrative and propositional approaches, something of the breadth and depth of trying to characterise the different features, types and levels of practical theological research.

Practical theological research through the living human document: introducing the authors

Research in practical theology is undertaken by particular humans in specific historical and social contexts. In this section of the chapter we each introduce aspects of ourselves and our concerns in the form of personal narratives that give a sense of where we have come from and what we do in relation to practical theological research. Narrative can, of course, be over-valued and misrepresented as an uncomplicated, truthful and authentic form of communication (Eakin, 2004). But it is one way of representing key aspects of ourselves and our concerns to readers so they can evaluate the nature and integrity of our overall approach to research. It also allows you to see something of the variety and different motivations and methods that can impinge on practical theological research.

Each of us has been shaped by communities, traditions and ideas, theological and other. We have not sprung from nowhere; we owe who we are and how we see the world to many others, academics, theologians, communities, families, friends, the living, the departed. Some of these we allude to directly, but the thickness of human life and experience expressed in narrative form resists the labelling of ideas and experiences with relevant academic references. Within every thesis or book in practical theology, there is a real person with commitments, passions, concerns, biases and values trying to get out. Here we try to give a sense of this integration of person and research, mindful, too, that our narratives demonstrate all-too-human inconsistencies and that together they provide not so much a synthetic view of the ‘wholeness’ of practical theological research and its practitioners, but more a vision of its pluralism, partiality and incoherence. We are on a journey together as friends, colleagues and practitioners. We have much in common, but part of the stimulus to research is what differentiates us and what we have yet to discover, individually and collectively. Welcome, then, to our joint and several worlds.

Zoë Bennett

My commitment to writing this book arises from a calling, a vocation, to be a teacher, and in two ways. The first is historical, and partly serendipitous. In 1995 the Cambridge Theological Federation, the institution I work for, validated an MA in pastoral theology with Anglia Ruskin University (then Anglia Polytechnic University). As the only person on the staff who understood the educational language of aims and objectives, of module definition sheets and the paraphernalia of contemporary pedagogy in higher education, I became programme director. Ironically, I have a deeply humanistic and experiential philosophy of education, preferring process to objectives, and human development to grading. From this engagement with practical theology came my involvement in the UK’s professional doctorate in practical theology. For me, the first aim of this project is to clarify for myself, and to bring to speech, all that I have learned from collaborative working on the professional doctorate – both that which I already know I have learned, and that which I have learned but which hasn’t yet become conscious.

The second connecting element between the practice of pedagogy, my vocation as a teacher, and the commitment to this book goes deeper into my life-experience and identity. I became a pastoral and practical theologian initially by accident, but this move reflected my lifetime commitment to, and ongoing study of, learning and teaching processes.

Having studied Plato’s Socratic Dialogues in school, with an eccentric and brilliant teacher whose pedagogical approach suited my temperament perfectly, I have retained the excitement or the vision of those lessons. We were expected to react directly to the text (no secondary literature); we were asked the big questions which were there in the text as if the most important thing was our own growth in wisdom and understanding (‘do you think that there are aesthetic absolutes as well as moral absolutes? And are there moral absolutes?’); we spent whole lessons in discussion and collaborative thinking (translating the text was a technicality done at home). This gave me a deeply rooted humanism, which included the importance of human experience, of my own judgement, and of historical perspectives and the value the seemingly strange and other. Experiential education for me is not primarily about techniques of getting people to learn things by participation and by doing; it is crucially about ‘drawing out’ (Latin e-ducere) what is there inside human beings but untapped, unexplored, untheorised.

Accounts of Socrates’ dialectical approach emphasise the posing of contraries to elicit progression. Equally important for me is the ‘Rogerian’ attention to human experience as the ground of worthwhile human knowing (Rogers, 1969). The teacher midwifes the birth of what is within, but yet unknown and unspoken. Such philosophical and practical commitments found a natural partner in practical theology, with its dialectic or ‘critical conversation’ between experience, tradition and self, between what is happening, what is given, and personal voice.

The key values and beliefs I hold in my practice of pedagogy I hold in my theology: self-reflexivity, epistemological reserve, practice/experience as a location of radiant immanence in which we may find ‘God’. I have found in my co-authors enough common ground here to speak of a shared world. I want to make our account of that available to others within our communities of practice who embrace the same understandings, priorities and loves, especially those who either have not been able to articulate them yet, or who or feel partly ashamed of them and would value solidarity. And I want to commend this way of understanding and practice to others for whom it is alien.

The next life-stage for me after the Socratic school experiences (during which I had no explicit religious commitment) was a long immersion in an ‘open evangelical’ Christian culture. Here I was engaged in deep, regular reading and discussion of the Bible, public and private. From this inheritance came my ineradicable love of the Bible. In reaction to it came my later wrestling with the Bible in suspicion and anger (for example, in relation to the treatment of women in Christian traditions). But I have never let go.

Navigating between the values, commitments and world-views of these two formative influences has been a personal journey happening alongside my development as a practical theologian.

Studying some years later for an MPhil in Cambridge I had a burning question in my mind and heart: ‘what kind of animal is this “Bible”?’ Inerrant or infallible (the argument in my evangelical world), or neither? In any way connected with theology, or not? (I was naïvely shocked when I found no one else brought a Bible to the Faculty Christology Seminar). I chose the route through the MPhil entitled Christian Theology in the Modern World, despite the attractions of the New Testament route to an evangelical classicist soaked in Scripture and the Greek language, because I wanted to grasp a wider context for biblical interpretation – to understand the Bible’s use and its relationship to theology, faith, and practice.

(Bennett, 2016, p. 24)

I came to doing my own doctorate in practical theology much later, when I had already published a good deal. I therefore chose the route of PhD by Published Work. For this I submitted work published over the preceding ten years, and wrote a critical commentary on how this work made a significant and coherent contribution to knowledge in my field. ‘Coherent’ was the problem. How could I suggest that work on feminist theology, ecumenical pedagogy in practical theology, the dialectic between the Bible/Christian tradition and experience/practice, not to mention research on John Ruskin, made a coherent whole? A friend said to me, ‘When you can see what the connection is between feminist theology and John Ruskin you will have got it’! ‘Impossible’, I said.

The key, I discovered, was in self-reflexivity. I was the key. My commitment to these various projects all stemmed from something inside me: a dissatisfaction with how things are, a curiosity, a questioning of the status quo, a sense of being on the margins and the search for an alternative perspective. Above all, they were all connected to a need to get some critical space, to sit in a different place, to ask questions of what was taken for granted because what was taken for granted was so often damaging to me or to others. I called my thesis Finding a critical space: Practical theology, history and experience; it closes thus:

The substantial question which gives coherence to this submitted body of work is the search for a critical space within experience and tradition from which to do the work of practical theology, and the contribution which an historical perspective, as exemplified in my work on John Ruskin, may offer to this. It is about having ‘a place to stand’, or to change the metaphor, spectacles through which to look. Archimedes’ place from which to lever the globe, however, or ‘heaven’ as the spectacles from which to view the earth, may superficially suggest that critical space as being above and beyond this world. On the contrary, my work locates the critical space on offer to us in the messy history and experience of human beings – and to be found in the examination of a particular historical figure (John Ruskin) and in the self-critical exploration of our own … context … and practices … .

(http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/313911/)

As I confessed earlier, my engagement with practical theology happened in an unplanned and unexpected way. I similarly tumbled into research on John Ruskin when my university took his name as part of its own. Did this great Victorian polymath, art critic and social critic have anything to offer practical theology? I found gold. Ruskin’s commitment to, and exploration of, good ‘seeing’ offered practical theologians for whom seeing, along with judging and acting, is a central practice, rich material. His use of the Bible in his engagement with the social realities he saw offered a challenge, and crucially, a perspective from somewhere which wasn’t my own, a critical space. Most of all, he offered companionship along the road. Here was a human being who in a different time and place had wrestled like me with the tensions, destructive and creative, between the Bible in which he was soaked and the contemporary public and private realities of his life, and who was afraid of neither the public nor private dimensions of this wrestling. My using Ruskin as a paradigm for an engagement with historical thinkers and practitioners could enrich the discipline of practical theology immeasurably.

Without better seeing there is no better acting. I have argued that John Ruskin can contribute to our endeavour through his discussions of how important it is to see well and how it is we might do so, but, even more than this, his example of seeing well across a range of disciplines and objects of sight. What is more he demonstrates the telling of what we see ‘in a plain way’, and how that clarity of ‘plainness’ is achieved through integrity, passion, and disciplined attention to how we represent what we have seen in the public world in a way which does the work we want it to do with our audience.

Furthermore, Ruskin’s lifelong engagement with the biblical text, in virtually daily reading of it, constant personal note taking and much use of it in published work, and all this in the context of a deep existential and intellectual awareness of the Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ through which he lived, make him for the practical theologian a precious source of material for reflection and a companion who constantly stimulates the imagination and challenges the faculties. He can enrich both the content and the method of practical theology.

(Bennett, 2011, p. 202)

My most substantial published work on Ruskin is also primarily a work on the Bible (Bennett, 2013). It is to the Bible I have returned, working with a biblical scholar, Christopher Rowland (Bennett and Rowland, 2016). I have come to engage with the Bible in ways which are very different from those of my earlier life. I value the stimulus to the imagination which it invites and the critique of, and challenge to, contemporary realities which it offers, most powerfully through the horizon of hope which emerges constantly, prophetically and apocalyptically from its words, stories and images. As a crucial element in the practice of living a reflective, self-reflexive and critical life the Bible has become part, for me, of this commitment which predated its advent in my life: for a human being ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Plato, Apology 38a5–6).

Elaine Graham

I had a conventional Anglican upbringing and remember taking my confirmation and its preparation very seriously. But as a teenager I couldn’t find a place to express that: at school, religious matters were monopolised by a group of (what I would now identify as) conservative Evangelical girls associated with a local charismatic Baptist congregation. They were a very distinct sub-culture in the school, especially in the Sixth form, and projected an image of Christianity in terms of all the things you weren’t allowed to do – and for girls, what you shouldn’t aspire to (male headship was supreme). I wasn’t able to articulate it this way at the time, but I instinctively perceived this as a form of religion that represented human diminishment, rather than fulfilment.

And yet I was always very interested in the ethical and social dimensions of life. I took the world and it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Notes on the authors
• Introduction
• 1 Locating ourselves: starting where we are
• 2 Reflection, reflexivity and the research journey
• 3 Researching religious practice and performance
• 4 Communities of practice
• 5 Finding a critical space: interpreting and inhabiting traditions
• 6 Framing the view
• 7 Ethos, process and outcomes
• 8 Conclusion: moving on
• Index