faithasawayoflife

unpacking

Here's some pics of my new office, 320F Northwestern, at Luther Seminary. 

We've been unpacking at our house since Saturday and have made huge progress there, and today  I had a chance to get after the boxes in my office.  So nice to find old friends (like Alfred North Whitehead's 1926 Lowell Lectures, Religion in the Making, in the original Macmillan 1926 hardback edition from my teacher James M. Gustafson's library (it has his marginalia  throughout)) and new ones (like Slavoj Zizek's The Fragil Absolute--or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? (along with a helpful overview of this and a number of Zizek's recent publications by Ashley Woodiwiss in Books & Culture)). 
Here's one more from the office.
Peace,
Chris

Angels: a pop culture facination theologians are ducking?

Are theologians ducking the once-obligatory study of angels?  While my friend Kelton Cobb was here at Holden teaching on pop culture and faith--the subject of his fine book--I had the thought that even though angels are everywhere in popular culture and religious imagination, they seem to have fallen off the list of subjects getting serious treatment from theologians.  I can easily think of pop songs, movies, and tv shows, along with lots of gift store cards and stautettes of angels. On the book front,  I haven't done a careful bibliographic search, but a check of our library here at Holden offered a recent book by Billy Graham (not serious theology) and a 1957 book by Jean Danielou, S. J. called The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church.  It is lovely, short, and comprehensive.  He states that even in the 1950s when he wrote the subject was already falling out of favor among theologians.  He argues that when angels are raised, and that is not often, it is either treated as a personification of psychological realities or a heretical spiritualism, and neither is an acceptable conclusion from a Christian perspective.  This in the introduction.  Then he moves to discuss a series of topics drawing on the thought of the church fathers (more or less up to Aquinas, to whom he gives highest praise for his discussion of angels in the Summa Theologica). 

What would be really interesting is to see a practical theologian with a lively sense of contemporary discipleship, media, and theological depth write on this topic.  What are the ways angels 'show up' in contemporary culture, and what meaning to people give to them?  What has the Scripture and tradition to say regarding angels and how has this teaching shifted across the centuries?  And what might we say about faithful discipleship today, about God's work in the world, and about the specific role angels play in that?  This has to connect to preaching and worship, but much more, too.  Hmm.  I wish I had time for this one--perhaps a project for a laboratory in practical theology!
Peace,
Chris

faith as a way of life: theologically thin?

the first blog review of my new book, faith as a way of life, is by Sean Lucas who is Chief Academic Officer and Associate Professor of Church History at Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, MO.

 You can read the whole thing here or here.   He notes it is a book emerging out of the Lilly-Funded Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Program, and that his own institution, Covenant, has one of these grants.  He then does a fair if quick summary of the book.  He concludes this summary of the book with a rose and a stinker.  First this: "There was a great deal here which was helpful: gracefully written, thoughtful and thought-provoking, intellectually-grounded and yet accessible."  Then, this: "I was struck by how theologically thin this book felt at times."

Wow, I thought.  Theologically thin?  The whole thing is hung on a pretty substantial Pauline-Lutheran framework that gives the whole depth beyond what typical works on pastoral leadership offer.  Or at least that was my endeavor.  What was his worry, exactly?  What part felt "theologically thin"?  I found the answer to that question telling.

Let me quote Lucas at some length and then offer a first try at a response:

"For example, in each of the four spheres, Scharen offered discrete practices (table fellowship; testimony, communal discernment, making music), all of which may be pastorally appropriate. And yet, I wondered several things--how do these particular practices find their grounding in and flow from rich theological traditions? How do they reinforce a particular view of the world? What stories make sense of these practices over others--why these practices?

As with a great deal of the literature over the past ten years that emphasize practices or rituals (ranging from Dorothy Bass to Catherine Bell), there is almost a misbegotten faith that if we can simply inculcate practices that we will form people in appropriately spiritual ways. My contention is that practices divorced from a grounding in a thick theological tradition--a vision of who God is and who humans are, of sin and redemption, of things past and things to come--will not sustain people in the faith for the long haul. Rather, all they can produce is religious nominalism, which is a far cry from religious or pastoral excellence."

I'd venture to guess that I've been subjected to a blanket critique of a type of theological literature that Lucas is worried about.  It is actually telling that he lumps ten years of work that emphasizes practices or rituals, from Dorothy Bass (whom I do quote) to Catherine Bell (whose work I know well but do not quote).  It is true that for myself and for Bass, a virtue ethic is in the background.  Alisdair McIntyre has been important, and the whole virtue tradition.  But not only!  The work I've done, and I think Dorthy Bass has done, focuses on things humans do.  Those basic practices--making music, eating together, discerning together--are things we Christians share with others, and ought to do in distinctive ways because of the character of our life together.  They are not intended to be something distinctive to Christians but rather something Christians do in particular ways because of Christ who lives in us.  Ah, and here we see the difference theologically.  It is possible that my theological framework didn't ring true to an evangelical covenant scholar.  It is a challenge to read one another charitably, and Lucas did very much do so with my book. Yet it stumps me why he trips up on the theological grounding of the book.  I'll need to reflect more on this, but if anyone else has giving the book a read and has a comment, please help me think this through.
Peace,
Chris

holden beauty

For the summer, Sonja, the kids, and I are spending the summer at Holden Village in the North Cascades of Washington State.  Here is an amazing view of Sonja and I with friends Jonathan and Julie from Manchester, CT at Holden Lake.  It is five miles up hill from Holden.  The Mary Green glacier is above the cliffs in the background. The hike was amazing, with so many wildflowers.  Okay, since you asked, I'll post some flower pictures, too.  Here you go:

If you haven't been here, lay plans, my friends.  This place returns you to fundamentals of life.  It is like rubarbarb pie--it gives shy people the courage to stand up and do what is necessary.  More on this in my next post on Alan Storey.

+peace,

Chris

toward a walkable life

Hat tip to Mary Hess for a link to a cool site that calculates your home's walk score--how walkable life is in your neighborhood.  We're trying to build a walkable life as we move to St. Paul and I just found out we're moving from a house (however lovely it may be) with a walk score of 33 to a new house with a walk score of 66!  Well, we knew that our new life would be more walkable that here, but doubling the score is great. For fun I checked out my folks who live in the woods in Montana: oops--they got a 0.  But it is beautiful living in the woods!
Peace,
Chris

Endings and Beginnings

while many know already, I'm going to say it here.  I'm leaving Yale at the end of June to take a tenure track faculty position at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.  I'll be teaching in the area of worship, along with practical theology and ethics, contemporary culture (of course!), and pastoral leadership. I'll have a really fine colleague in the teaching of worship--Dirk Lange.   Luther is an amazing school, with a large and outstanding faculty, about 1000 students, and a location in a beautiful neighborhood of St. Paul just near the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota.  It is a place focused on preparing leaders for the Church's ministry in and for the world. Even its so-called "academic" programs (as if ministry is not intellectually challenging!) are bent towards the life of the church rather than being captive to the whims of the academy.  They participate in the life of the academy, but don't first of all set their agenda.  Plus they have at least five people doing field research in the practical theology whereas at Yale I've had no colleagues in that regard.  So for many, many reasons I'm looking forward to the move. 
We're expecting the packers next week and we're leaving New Haven in two weeks, so we're feeling sad to leave all that is beautiful about our life here.

Like the beautiful pink dogwood that graces the edge of the back deck Sonja and I built a couple years ago.

 Like our beautiful flock of chickens (this is a pic of my favorite, Herbert (aka Tina, Herbertina).

Keep us in your prayers as we savor friends and all that makes for community and home in a place, and head out in our car across the USofA.
anon, and peace,
Chris

miles davis on knowing bodily

I found a clip from a NBC Today Show interview with Miles from 1982.  Bryant Gumbel did the interview.  It is an interesting confirmation of something I'm working on just now--call it 'carnal knowing' which has to do not with sex, as some readers might imagine, but with bodily knowing.  This is the kind of learning, knowing, that takes practice to acquire but practice does not mean you acquire it.   It is part of my current long-term research project and something I've mentioned in this space before.  My point is that this form of knowing applies just as much to presiding at communion, preaching, etc. in ministry but that it has been undervalued because of the kind of knowing dominant in higher education: disengaged, rational, 'from the shoulders up'.

BG: Do you know right off the bat which musicians you like, who is good and who is not, who is not going to work out and who is gonna be with you . . .

MD: Yea, I get that feelin'.

BG: What do you look for?  Can you tell us?  Is it something you can describe or is it . . .

MD: First thing I look at in a musician is [undecipherable], what he wears, how he talks, how he walks, and when he lifts, picks up the instrument, his approach to the instrument, you know, he doesn't stumble with it, you know, they pick it up like it is part of their body, just an extension of their body,  you know what I'm saying, then you can almost tell how he's gonna play.

p.s. if you listen to the interview, get a load of his view of contemporary music and the food analogy!

axial age conference in erfurt

An amazing conference is happening among some of the leading social theorists globally gathering to both consider and, I think, assist Robert Bellah in his work on religious evolution and the key concept of the axial age. Something to watch, for sure, as it has profound implications on our understand of the present (just see Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, for example, to see that).

why habit matters in theological education

A really interesting article on "new habits" got me thinking about the relation between habit and cognition, bodily practice in creativity and learning, and the limited ways we moderns have for thinking about knowing.  This is something I was just reading about in Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age (yes, I'm still reading, trying to finish by the end of May.  I'm on page 618, so the end is near.) He wrote (p. 615) in a section on the long process of 'excarnation' in Latin Christendom:

"If we think of the three levels of human linguistic-communicative activity in its broadest sense: one of bodily habitus and mimicry, one of symbolic expression in art, poetry, music, dance; and one of prose, descriptive language; we can say that aboriginal religious life was mainly couched in the first two, but that the culture which emerges from modern Western Reform has largely abandoned these, and confines itself to the third.

The rationalist paradigm that took hold of professional education--and theological education as well--over the last two hundred years has overemphasized  detached cognitive reasoning.  It has also overemphasized the individual thinker in whose mind such reasoning takes place.  One of the reasons for common work (either in classroom settings or in a practical theology research laboratory such as I've described here) is that it allows for a richer conception of human thinking and communication to come to the fore. 

My next project has to do with an epistemology of professional practice, looking at ministry in particular, and the beginnings of the project are outlined in my chapter contribution to a new book in practical theology titled For Life Abundant, available now, (see ch. 11, titled: "Learning Ministry over Time: Embodying Practical Wisdom").  The ideas there are  woven through other chapters, too, and the concern is highlighted for further consideration in the book's last section titled: "In Anticipation" (isn't that a nice alternative to "conclusion" as if we'd wrapped up all that needed to be said . . . not!)

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Affirming the intelligence of practice

Texts and propositions alone cannot carry or communicate the knowledge of God’s grace in Christ that is at the heart of Christian existence. This lifegiving knowledge, which dwells in the bodies of believers and in the Body they comprise, is gained through forms of active and receptive participation that engage a wide range of human capacities. Likewise, the specific practices by which we respond to God’s grace — practices such as prayer, forgiveness and hospitality — bear knowledge of God, ourselves and the world that cannot be reduced to words, even though words are often important in helping us to learn and participate faithfully in them. Such practices embody certain kinds of wisdom and foster certain kinds of intelligence when engaged in serious and critical ways. The practice of Christian ministry also requires and imbues forms of knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence that include but reach far beyond mere cognition. Practical theology serves the church and the world by honoring and articulating such knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence as they emerge in actual persons and communities, and by considering how they might most faithfully be deepened and shared for the sake of abundant life. In doing so, practical theology seeks to clarify the intelligence of practice without reducing it, and to query its reasons even while acknowledging that it is impossible fully to comprehend either the concrete uniqueness or the Spirit-led possibility inherent in any given instance of practice. Like faithful ministry and discipleship, practical theology pursues the telos of a life-giving way of life in awareness that the means employed in doing so—the practices of faith, including the arts of ministry—are not merely tools. Rather they are both the goal and the path of the Christian life.

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anon, and +peace,

Chris

towards a laboratory in practical theology

In one of those unexplainable lateral leaps through curiosity-inducing links on the web, I found myself at the website of a former teacher, Paul Rabinow (Anthropology, UC Berkeley).  He has, together with a few colleagues, formed the Antropology of the Contemporary Research Collabratory (ARC).  They describe it this way:

"ARC is a collaboratory in the human sciences. Its aim is to develop techniques of collaboration, modes of communication, and tools of inquiry appropriate to an anthropology of the contemporary."

The image they've chosen on the top of their website shows a traditional science lab with an ocean teeming with life pouring in through the door.  Whatever they meant with this picture, one key is the effort to collapse the distance between the experimental research in the lab and the complexity of life just outside.  Yet the picture of a typical natural sciences lab belies the intention to be a quite different sort of laboratory that the typical science lab.

An important statement of their idea is the working paper: "What is a laboratory in the Human Sciences?"

Concerns that brought them to found this lab include:

1. Dissatisfaction with the model of the "individual project" that assumes that interpretive and authorial virtuosity is the mainspring of good work.

2. Interest in how the context of a laboratory could encourage active thinking about the nature of collaborative work, originality, authorship, and about the collective tasks such as concept building to what seem to be individual tasks such as ethnographic fieldwork or focused historical research.  But this also means that new ways of thinking about how knowledge is generated and how credit is given are needed.

3. The laboratory, they think, can more fully recognize the diffuse character of authorship  as it is formed through conversations, borrowed concepts, and exposure to the work of scholars working on related topics.  In the laboratory setting, authorship is a "problem"  because, as compared to the usual academic conference and its 'collected' work, the laboratory creates 'collective' work.

4. It follows, then, that the laboratory setting focuses on concept formation, on the experiment, on the question, and through such common work in experimentation and knowledge building it is depersonalizing rather than emphasizing the virtues and talents of an individual author.

I place this really exciting development in relation to work I've been involved with over the last five years working to contribute to the restructuring of Practical Theology (one result of our common work is the volume For Life Abundant).  One of the key issues arising from our common work is to highlight the telos to academic work in practical theology that drives from research to ministry to discipleship to the life of the world.  All our academic work in practical theology is, so to speak, for life abundant.  Dorothy Bass, who led this seminar, and has done similar seminars over the last 10 years, has really emphasized collaborative seminar-based work, but the results in the end are still of the 'collected' sort, not really able to recognize the fullness of the 'collective' nature of what we've done, even if we've stretched the 'collected' sort very far towards the 'collective' in this new book. 

It seems that the potential for a laboratory in practical theology would offer the same sorts of benefits Rabinow and his colleagues suggest, but it would also, within practical theology, give a common focus to the usually disparate work of those working in various sub-areas: preaching, pastoral care, youth and family ministry, congregational leadership, mission, worship, education, social ethics, and so on.  The lab would join our work around at least 1) common conversation about problems to address, e.g. living in a secular age, pop culture and the media explosion, the climate crisis, terror and security, globalization, etc; 2) common conversation about concept formation and methods for gaining insight; 3) more integrated and multi-faceted proposals for faithful engagement of such problems; 4) a more realistic space for training students since the issues in life and ministry are confronted as wholes, not as, say, discrete problems for preaching or leadership.

Well, lots more for conversation here, but I've been leaning this direction for a very long time, and feel like this model at ARC is pushing me off the fence to really seek to make something like this work. 

anon and peace,
Chris