Pastoral Theology and Care E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 384

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Leading pastoral theologians explore a wide variety of themes related to pastoral practice.

Pastoral Theology and Care: Critical Trajectories in Theory and Practice offers a collection of essays by leading pastoral theologians that represent emerging trajectories in the fields of pastoral theology and care. The topics explored include: qualitative research and ethnography, advances in neuroscience, care across pluralities and intersections in religion and spiritualties, the influence of neoliberal economics in socio-economic vulnerabilities, postcolonial theory and its implications, the intersections of race and religion in caring for black women, and the usefulness of intersectionality for pastoral practice. Each of the essays offers a richly illustrated review of a practice of pastoral care relationally and in the public domain.

The contributions to this volume engage seven critical directions emerging in the literature of pastoral theology in the United States and internationally among pastoral and practical theologians. While coverage of these topics does not exhaust important points of activity in the field, it does represent especially promising resources for theory and practice. This important work:

• Offers unique coverage of new directions in the field
• Includes contributions from an exceptional group of experts who are noted leaders in their areas of study
• Introduces the newest perspectives on pastoral care and offers constructive proposals

Filled with case illustrations that make chapters pedagogically useful, Pastoral Theology and Care is essential reading for faculty, seminarians and students in advanced degree programs, and pastors.  

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

List of Contributors

Introduction

1 Practice Matters: New Directions in Ethnography and Qualitative Research

Development of the Research Trajectory

Pastoral Ethnography and Qualitative Research

Ecclesiology and Ethnography

Narrative Approaches to Qualitative Research

Why Practice Matters

Moving Forward: Narrative Means to Pastoral Theological Ends

Conclusion

References

For Further Study

2 How the Brain Matters

Introduction and Literature Review

Daniel’s Story

Embodying Pastoral Theology

Looking Forward

References

3 Class Power and Human Suffering: Resisting the Idolatry of the Market in Pastoral Theology and Care

Introduction and Literature Review

Forgetting Class

Class in Everyday (Neoliberal) Life: Structure and Dynamics

Class Struggle: What Does Pastoral Theology Have to Do with It?

Pastoral Care: Promoting, Accommodating, or Resisting Class Structure?

Conclusion

References

4 Postcolonializing Pastoral Theology: Enhancing the Intercultural Paradigm

Introduction

How Postcolonial?

Postcolonial Criticism in Pastoral Theology and Care

Themes in Postcolonial Pastoral Theology

Can the Subaltern Speak? Voice, Access, Space

Knowledge and Epistemology

Practices of Care

Spirituality is Central in the Practice of Pastoral Care and Counseling

Individuals Cannot Be Well in Isolation: Building Healthy Community

It Takes the Whole World: Transforming Cultures

Conclusion

References

5 Caring from a Distance: Intersectional Pastoral Theology amid Plurality Regarding Spirituality and Religion

Contextualizing Matters

PT&C and Plurality in Religious Location: Developments thus Far

What is in a Caring Distance?: Learning from the Case

Future Steps

References

6 Womanist Pastoral Theology and Black Women’s Experience of Gender, Religion, and Sexuality

Pushing Against the Grain of Imposed Normativity: Womanist Pastoral Theologizing

Womanist Pastoral Theologizing

Womanist Pastoral Epistemological Claims and Aims

Intersectional Realities in Black Women’s Religious Experience

Emerging Psychologies of Black Religion

Religion—It’s Complicated

Forming a Religious Self, Converting Gender and Sexuality

Converting Sexuality through Religion

Conclusion: Womanist Pastoral Ethics from the Ground of Emergent Being

References

7 Analyzing and Engaging Asymmetries of Power: Intersectionality as a Resource for Practices of Care

Introduction and Literature Review

Review of Literature

Intersectionality as a Valuable Resource for Pastoral and Practical Theology

Exploring the “Fit” for Intersectionality as a Methodological Resource for Pastoral and Practical Theology

Intersectionality as it Informs Our Pastoral Response

Conclusion

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 06

Figure 6.1 Case example of converging influences on being (created by Arelis Benetez and Phillis Sheppard, 2017).

Chapter 07

Figure 7.1 Intersectional model (from Holvino, 2012).

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Pastoral Theology and Care

Critical Trajectories in Theory and Practice

Edited by Nancy J. Ramsay

This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Ramsay, Nancy J. (Nancy Jean), 1949– editor.Title: Pastoral theology and care : critical trajectories in theory and practice / edited by Nancy Ramsay.Description: First edition. | Chichester, UK ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017037355 (print) | LCCN 2017044590 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119292548 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119292593 (epub) | ISBN 9781119292524 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119292562 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Pastoral theology. | Pastoral care.Classification: LCC BV4011.3 (ebook) | LCC BV4011.3 .P368 2018 (print) | DDC 253–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037355

Cover Image: © reklamlar/GettyimagesCover Design: Wiley

ForPeggy Ann Brainerd Way1931–2016

and

Emma Justes1941–2017

Trailblazing women whose intelligence, courage, commitment, and passionshaped the foundations of contemporarypastoral theology and care in the United States.They spoke “truth to power” with piercing honesty.They understood justice is the context in which love flourishes.

List of Contributors

Kathleen J. GreiderResearch ProfessorClaremont School of Theology

David A. HogueProfessor of Pastoral Theology and CounselingGarrett‐Evangelical Theological Seminary

Emmanuel Y. Amugi LarteyL. Bevel Jones, III Professor of Pastoral Theology, Care and CounselingChandler School of Theology, Emory University

Mary Clark MoschellaRoger J. Squire Professor of Pastoral Care and CounselingYale University Divinity School

Nancy J. RamsayProfessor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral CareBrite Divinity School

Bruce Rogers‐VaughnAssociate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and CounselingThe Divinity School, Vanderbilt University

Phillis Isabella SheppardAssociate Professor of Religion, Psychology, and CultureThe Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University

Introduction

Nancy J. Ramsay

The chapters in this volume invite students, pastors, and faculty to engage seven critical trajectories emerging in the literature of pastoral theology in the United States and internationally among pastoral and practical theologians. While these seven trajectories do not exhaust important points of activity in the field, they do represent especially promising resources for theory and practice. These trajectories include: qualitative research and ethnography, implications arising from advances in neuroscience, care across pluralities and intersections in religion and spiritualities, the influence of neoliberal economics in experiences of socio‐economic vulnerabilities, postcolonial theory and its implications, the intersections of race and religion in caring for black women, and the usefulness of intersectional methodologies for pastoral practice. The contributors are closely identified with the trajectories they trace and extend. Each chapter richly illustrates the implications for practices of care relationally and in public contexts engaging structures and systems. The essays include not only a review of recent literature giving shape to each trajectory, but also the author’s constructive proposals for further advancing the trajectory’s horizons. Particularly helpful is an opportunity in each chapter to identify how scholars in various international contexts are also exploring these themes.

Mary Clark Moschella helped to introduce qualitative research and ethnographic methods to the field of pastoral theology. In her essay, we find explorations of several diverse “streams” in this trajectory allowing students a comparative review of the creativity across the trajectory as a whole, as well as Dr. Moschella’s new constructive proposals drawing on narrative theory and therapy to advance the usefulness of ethnographic practices to confront and redress the oppressive effects of hegemonic factors such as racism and ethnocentrism embedded in the narratives of individuals and of communities.

While neuroscience is not technically a new area of research among pastoral theologians, recent advances in neuroscience have lately sparked a wider engagement. David Hogue brings a depth of reflection and engagement with neuroscience to his review of this trajectory. He also offers constructive theological and theoretical explorations of the implications for practices of care with individuals and in public life, such as new insights in neuroscience for resisting the hegemonic force of privilege and domination that, once learned, shape neurological connections.

Bruce Rogers‐Vaughn brings new perspectives to bear that demonstrate how rarely pastoral theologians have engaged issues of class and economic inequality as important factors in practices of care for individuals and families and in public contexts. He rightly points to the limitations this has created in literature and resources. He illustrates how neoliberal economic policies have become cultural in scope as a radical individualism in the United States and beyond. This neoliberalization of our culture is implicated in epidemic levels of addiction, suicide, and depression, as well as the stress of economic precarity in the “second Gilded Age” in the United States.

Emmanuel Lartey is a primary voice in the trajectory shaped by the use of postcolonial critical theories that disclose the defacing and subjugating effects of colonial oppression. Here Lartey not only traces the emergence of this trajectory but pays close attention to three key themes explored in its literature: voice, epistemology, and praxis. He demonstrates how engaging postcolonial insights offers reciprocal benefits for those whose heritage is shaped by coloniality. In particular, drawing especially on experiences and practices of care in African cultures, Lartey argues that recentering care around spirituality extends its efficacy in building community and transforming cultures.

Kathleen Greider is a primary voice in shaping pastoral theology’s trajectory of resources for responding with understanding and skill in an increasingly spiritually plural and interreligious culture in the United States and beyond. She develops a richly illustrated journey with Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered the death of family members in decades of religiously fueled violence, and who nonetheless seek to communicate with care and respect across the intersections of a culture marred by violence. Greider helps us learn about care across distances that arise in such religious and spiritual plurality. She explores the priority of receiving otherness for practices of care in spiritual and religious plurality.

Phillis Sheppard is a central contributor to current womanist theory and care. Here she explores the trajectory of intersectional approaches in womanist literature and offers new proposals for the particular intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion. In particular, she brings constructive contributions to the particular intersection of black women’s lived religion and sexuality that is more plural and complex than it often appears in pastoral theology and womanist literature. She also provides new proposals for intersectional attention to a womanist psychology of religion currently undertheorized in pastoral theology.

My own work especially attends to pastoral theological engagement in public life. This essay introduces the metatheory of intersectionality, first voiced by African American women as well as other women whose historic and current experience reflect the oppressive effects of coloniality. Intersectional methodologies name and resist situations of social inequality. This chapter illustrates the close alignment of intersectional commitments with those of public pastoral theology. It illustrates the methodological usefulness of intersectional approaches for assisting pastoral and practical theologians to name and engage abuses of power in relational, communal, and public contexts.

1Practice Matters: New Directions in Ethnography and Qualitative Research

Mary Clark Moschella

I trace my own nascent interest in ethnography and pastoral care back to 1993, when I attended the famous Re‐imagining conference sponsored by the Ecumenical Decade Committee for Churches in Solidarity with Women, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There I participated in my first anti‐racism workshop, where personal experiences of racism were poignantly described and blatant instances of racism in the media were dissected. I remember feeling overwhelmed by emotion and asking the leaders of the workshop what I could do, as a white woman, to make a difference. The leaders gave me a surprising answer: learn more about your own ethnicity. Ever the literalist, I took this on in graduate school, where I conducted an ethnographic study of Italian Catholic devotional practices in Mary, Star of the Sea parish in San Pedro, California (Moschella, 2008a). Through immersion in one Italian American community, a picture of the people’s lives, faith, and practices began to appear. Through studying the history of immigration, I saw how the process of Italian immigrants becoming American in the early to mid‐20th century was clearly linked to a process of “becoming white.” My research helped me understand how discrimination and racism have persisted in the US and how these forces can be challenged or supported by religious practices. This research experience also convinced me that pastoral care itself must be reimagined if it is to be a truly liberating endeavor.

For me, engaging in an ethnographic study was a transformative experience, and one that set the stage for my work in developing a methodology for pastoral ethnography (Moschella, 2008b). I soon discovered that I was not alone in reaching toward this new approach and that I was participating in a growing trajectory of scholarship employing qualitative research as a means toward pastoral (or practical) theological ends. In this chapter, I will offer a brief history of this trajectory in the field of pastoral theology, with some attention to the wider discipline of practical theology as well. I will then describe a number of recent, exemplary studies within this trajectory, grouping them into three streams of work, and noting how the issues animating the broader field of qualitative research have echoes and analogues in pastoral research. The three streams include: ethnographic and qualitative research that illuminates and invigorates pastoral practices; the work of the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network of scholars that focuses on the intersection between theology and ecclesial practices; and narrative qualitative studies. These three streams are not exhaustive; neither are they entirely discrete, as will become evident. Many of the exemplary studies I reference demonstrate the overlapping concerns, methods, and goals in each category. Nevertheless, this broad classification helps illumine the contours of pastoral scholars’ current questions, goals, and contributions. Following this exploration of the literature, I will make a case for the importance of qualitative research in pastoral theology and care, arguing that practice matters, and that exploring actual practice is in fact central to the field’s stated identity of “constructive theology growing out of the exercise of caring relationships” (Mission Statement, Journal of Pastoral Theology). In the last section, I will address future directions in this research trajectory, articulating my particular interest in the development of the third research stream, narrative qualitative research, and its burgeoning creative, therapeutic, and prophetic capacities.

Development of the Research Trajectory

The qualitative research trajectory in pastoral theology and care participates in a broader “turn to culture” in theological and religious studies that can be seen in the work of historians, ethicists, systematic theologians, and biblical scholars.1 Timothy Snyder offers an apt description of this pronounced shift:

The turn to culture in academic theology has recovered its incarnational, or embodied, nature, which has at times been obscured by the abstract and universalizing tendencies of theological reflection in the post‐Enlightenment era. Most of all, it reintroduced a creative tension between the particular and the universal in theological reflection.

(Snyder, 2014)

Don Browning helped set the stage for pastoral and practical theologians to participate in this turn to culture with his emphasis on social and cultural description (Browning, 1991). Robert Schreiter’s work (1985) on local theologies embraces an inter‐connected view of theology and culture. Elaine Graham (1996) illuminates the transformational and revelatory dimensions of practice, highlighting the “creative tension” of which Snyder speaks, and arguing for an interpretive rather than prescriptive role for pastoral and practical theologians.

John Patton’s description of the communal contextual paradigm of care, along with his image of the pastoral caregiver as a “mini‐ethnographer” (Patton, 2005, p. 43) encourages pastors and scholars alike to pay careful attention to the lives of persons and communities in order to be able to practice genuinely helpful pastoral care. At the same time, multiple contributions of scholars of color, feminists, womanists, and others from under‐represented or marginalized social groups have challenged the pastoral field to recognize the dominant cultural paradigms embedded in the literature that do not adequately represent their lived religious experiences. Their focus on the cultural contexts of care, now routine in introductory pastoral theology and care courses, spurred the need for new methodologies in pastoral research.

The field of congregational studies provided impetus and resources for the pastoral trajectory in qualitative research by emphasizing the study of congregations in their complex social and geographic ecologies (Ammerman et al., 1998; Eiesland, 2000). Participatory action research, with its emphasis on community‐based research for the purpose of social change, is a related approach that practical theologians have taken up with vigor (Cameron et al., 2010; Conde‐Frazier, 2012). My work on ethnography as a pastoral practice brings ethnographic principles and methods to the practice of pastoral care (Moschella, 2008b). To date, numerous scholars from pastoral and practical theology as well as other theological fields have been engaging in qualitative research studies linked to theological reflection (Scharen and Vigen, 2011).

Similarly, the teaching of ethnography and qualitative research in theological schools has been expanding dramatically. Once the sole purview of sociology of religion, such courses are now taught by pastoral, practical, and systematic theologians, ethicists, field education supervisors, clinical pastoral educators, and others. Susan Willhauck (2016), in research funded by Wabash, found that qualitative research methods are being taught in more than 50 theological schools in the US and Canada alone.

I argue that the disciplined study of religious practices is one way of keeping pastoral scholars and practitioners accountable to the people in the ecclesial, social, and political worlds we address. In pastoral theology, in particular, we need to be informed about the particular practices and experiences of a wide array of culturally and religiously diverse persons, congregations, and communities. Rather than prescribing overly general theories of care, we need the wisdom that can only come from close exploration of lived theology and practice. The qualitative research trajectory helps us reclaim the central importance of listening, of attending to people in their socio‐cultural particularity, and allowing ourselves to learn from the people who share their stories with us.

The Field of Qualitative Research

This trajectory in pastoral theological research has required us to adapt the methodological resources of the broader field of qualitative research. In their Introduction to The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research, Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2011) review the various research paradigms animating that field. Rehearsing the history of debates among proponents of quantitative, positivist, constructivist, and critical theory paradigms, the authors show how forms of resistance to qualitative research still loom over the field. While many quantitative researchers regard qualitative studies as “unreliable, impressionistic, and not objective” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, p. 9), qualitative researchers assert the value of studying “the world of lived experience, for this is where individual belief and action intersect with culture” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, p. 2). These tensions linger, contributing to a range of interpretive paradigms within qualitative research, ranging from positivist/postpositivist, constructivist, feminist, ethnic, Marxist, cultural studies, to queer theory (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, p. 13). Each of these approaches has distinct criteria for evaluation, theories of analysis, and types of narration. Denzin and Lincoln stress that the politics of interpretation must always be kept in view. They write:

The interpretive practice of making sense of one’s findings is both artistic and political. Multiple criteria for evaluating qualitative research now exist, and those we emphasize stress the situated, relational, and textual structures of the ethnographic experience. There is no single interpretive truth.

(Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, p. 15)

Denzin and Lincoln’s postmodern perspective, though still contested, finds echoes in much of the current work in pastoral and practical theology.

Such multiple interpretive paradigms can be seen in the three streams of ethnography and qualitative research that I describe below. These streams include: research in pastoral ethnography and qualitative research designed to illuminate and invigorate pastoral practices; the work of the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network, with its focus on theology; and qualitative studies that emphasize the development of alternative, justice‐oriented narratives. In each stream there are slightly different embedded values concerning not only the subject(s) of the research, but also the methods of evaluation, analysis, and narration. Norwegian practical theologian Tone Stangeland Kaufman, describing the “conundrum” of theologically motivated qualitative research, calls such embedded values, “theory‐laden practices with inherent normative dimensions” (2016, p. 146). It is also important for pastoral theologians to recognize the political dimensions of interpretation.

Pastoral Ethnography and Qualitative Research

The first broad stream of pastoral work with this trajectory employs qualitative research in order to elucidate and invigorate pastoral practices. The term “pastoral ethnography” implies the intention that the research process itself is conducted in such a way as to honor the voices of the participants, embody ethical regard in research relationships, and facilitate the participants’ increasing agency in their collective theology and practice (Moschella, 2008b). This work is often conducted by religious insiders (including but not limited to Christians) who acknowledge that they incorporate their theological values and questions into the research process. Studies of this sort plumb the wisdom and limitations of particular and/or local religious practices, which may inspire analogical insights for scholars and practitioners in diverse settings. This stream of work has been nurtured by the Study Group on Religious Practices and Pastoral Research at the Society for Pastoral Theology’s annual meetings since 2004. An early edited volume highlights the contributions of a number of these scholars (Maynard et al., 2010). Also included in this category are qualitative studies that are not ethnographic in nature, but utilize qualitative methods and purposes of inquiry. The Association for Practical Theology, the International Academy of Practical Theology, the Congregational Studies Project Team, and the Religious Education Association have also nurtured scholars’ use of qualitative research methods.2

A fine example of pastoral ethnography can be found in Leanna K. Fuller’s (2016) study, When Christ’s Body is Broken: Anxiety, Identity, and Conflict in Congregations. Here Fuller utilizes ethnographic methods to compare the experiences of conflict in two mostly white, mainline Protestant congregations. Through qualitative interviews and participant observation (the author had been on the staff of one of the churches when a conflict that split the church occurred), Fuller studies how the conflicts erupted, identifying the practices that helped each congregation manage the conflict and those practices that hurt and/or contributed to breakdown and alienation in each case. By comparing data from the two congregations’ experiences, and using psychodynamic, social psychological, and theological lenses to analyze her findings, Fuller gleans a layered understanding of these conflicts. This then enables her to offer broader practical, constructive proposals that are grounded in experience. How a congregation deals with conflict, Fuller points out, is as important as the substance of the conflict. Students, pastors, and other religious leaders can imagine points of intersection and insight for their diverse congregations and groups. Fuller makes transparent her pastoral theological commitment to offer a religious response to human suffering (Miller‐McLemore, 1998, p. 179; Fuller, 2016, p. 191), thereby enabling readers to evaluate the significance of her conclusions and recommendations more readily.

As noted above, pastoral and practical theologians are also employing qualitative methods (other than ethnography) to study a topic, a practice, or the experiences of a cohort of persons in similar situations. Such topics include: the faith lives of adolescent girls (Parker, 2007; Mercer, 2008), war (Graham, 2011), forced displacement (Holton, 2016), and so on. In A Womanist Theology against Intimate and Cultural Violence, Stephanie Crumpton (2014) offers a pastoral theology based on a qualitative study involving extensive individual and group interviews with six African American women who experienced childhood sexual abuse and/or intimate violence as adults. Through her analysis of these interviews, Crumpton identifies the extensive spiritual harm done to the women by their abusers and by a wider society that is quick to stereotype, blame, disbelieve, or disregard black women. Describing insights articulated by the women themselves, Crumpton constructs “working images of Womanist/Care” (p. 125) to inform congregational responses to such violence. She goes on to add a chapter on clinical considerations for pastoral counseling, utilizing self‐psychological theory in her analysis. The author’s explicit reference to her theology and womanist values exemplifies an interpretive paradigm that acknowledges the political commitments operative in all research and, rather than pretending to be neutral or disinterested, makes those commitments transparent. This paradigm is also evident in Phillis Sheppard’s essay in this volume.

An important larger‐scale study by pastoral theologian Brett Hoover (2014) demonstrates the benefits of doing ethnography in combination with extensive sociological research, both qualitative and quantitative. In The Shared Parish: Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U.S. Catholicism, Hoover describes how recent demographics have led to the phenomenon of “the shared parish” in Catholic churches in the US. Different from assimilationist American parishes or ethnic parishes, this phenomenon involves two or more cultural groups inhabiting the same church, “living in the tension between cultural difference and human connectedness” (Hoover, 2014, p. 222). Hoover’s in‐depth ethnography gives readers a close‐up view of how this phenomenon plays out in one such parish. By linking this ethnography to wider currents in Catholic parish life in the US, the author increases the credibility and relevance of his findings. At the conclusion of his study, Hoover offers a well‐grounded theological vision of community that honors cultural distinctiveness. Hoover’s work is rigorously interdisciplinary; significantly, he participates in the scholarly guilds of both theologians and social scientists.

These three exemplary studies suggest a range of recent work in this stream within the larger trajectory of qualitative research in pastoral and practical theology. In each case, the author is in some sense an insider, emic, exploring worlds of religious experience through face‐to‐face contact with research participants or partners. In these studies, we can see echoes of the constructivist, feminist and womanist, and ethnic interpretive paradigms found in the broader field of qualitative studies. Fuller’s study illumines the nature of conflict and pastoral responses in two mostly white US Protestant churches, providing much transferable wisdom for religious leaders. Crumpton’s study lifts up the particularity of African American women’s experiences of both intimate and cultural violence and shows how each kind of violence compounds the other. Hoover employed a postmodern research paradigm in his ethnography, where he participated as a bilingual Catholic priest, in order to understand how Latino and Euro‐Americans develop and manage intercultural practices in a shared parish. In these studies, the authors explore religious practice through research relationships in which they share their questions and their goals openly with their research partners. Their accounts demonstrate their convictions that the practices of the church really do matter on the ground, in the lives of people.

Ecclesiology and Ethnography

The second stream of work within the broad trajectory of qualitative research in practical and pastoral theology is associated with the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network. Founded by Pete Ward and Christian Scharen in 2007, this trans‐Atlantic network of scholars hosts a series of conferences taking place in Durham, UK, and other parts of Europe, a book series and a journal (Ward, 2012; Ecclesial Practices), as well as a thriving pre‐conference study group held at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. This body of work explores the intersection of Christian theology— particularly ecclesiology—with the study of local and particular faith practices. This work has been described, variously, as “constructive theological ethnography,” “ecclesial practices,” or “fieldwork in theology.” Contributors to this conversation include but are not limited to: Pete Ward, John Swinton, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Christian Scharen, Luke Bretherton, Tone Stangeland Kaufman, Jonas Ideström, Natalie Wigg‐Stevenson, and Eileen Campbell‐Reed. Establishing a starting point in Christian theology as the basis for qualitative research typifies some, but not all, of these authors’ approaches, which vary widely. These scholars are engaging in rigorous reflection upon theology, method, and practice, taking up questions of normativity, reflexivity, and representation. Some broadly define this area as “research in service of the church.”3

The issue of normativity appears prominently in the influential book, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research, written by Scottish practical theologians John Swinton and Harriett Mowat (2015). They argue that the veracity of Christian theology precedes and ultimately overrides the knowledge gained from social scientific study. This represents one end of a continuum of views that scholars in the network hold. These authors resolve the tension between practical theology and empirical knowledge by prioritizing Christian (Barthian) theology over other kinds of truth. Problems with this approach include the relative devaluation of human experience and an apparent disregard for the diversity and complexity of Christian theologies (Kaufman, 2016). Here we can hear echoes of the tensions in the larger field of qualitative research, where norms for interpretation are contested. Epistemological debates over which kinds of knowledge count in the academy and in the church are also at play.

Christian Scharen (2015) in Fieldwork in Theology begins with different theological warrants for engaging in the study of lived practices of faith: “the task of understanding [the complexity of this beautiful and broken world] requires a careful, disciplined craft for the inquiry—a craft I call fieldwork in theology—if one seeks both to claim knowledge of divine action and to discern an appropriate human response” (p. 5). He then turns to the social science of Pierre Bourdieu, arguing against many critics that for Bourdieu, “every act of research is simultaneously scholarship and a social commitment to make a better world” (p. 29). For Scharen, the aim of fieldwork is to analyze and clarify the church’s work in the world; it is to find with Merleau‐Ponty, “an entryway into a grounded, fleshly, incarnational approach to being in the world” (p. 29), so that concrete social realities can be identified and the church can be engaged in “moral solidarity with those in need” (p. 89). His work suggests a fuller role for qualitative research in practical and pastoral theology. Though normativity is still implied or “interwoven” in Scharen’s approach, as Tone Stangeland Kaufman’s helpful essay (2016) might suggest, there is more authority granted to the “grounded, fleshly, incarnational approach to being in the world” (Scharen, p. 29). For Scharen, the relationship between theology and human response (or practice) is more symmetrical in terms of what counts for valid understanding.

Perhaps the foremost example of an ethnographic study that explicitly engages reflexivity is Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (McClintock Fulkerson, 2007). This is the study of Good Samaritan United Methodist Church, an intentionally racially integrated congregation in Durham, North Carolina. This congregation also made an explicit commitment to welcoming members of a group home who had significant physical and intellectual dis/abilities. The church sought to provide, in McClintock Fulkerson’s phrase, “a place for all to appear” (p. 231). She offers a thick description of the worship services and other religious practices of the congregation. Employing reflexivity, McClintock Fulkerson describes her discomfort as a participant observer in this place. She acknowledges feeling ill‐at‐ease when she, a white southern woman, comes to worship one day and notices that three‐quarters of the congregation has dark skin. She also admits to finding herself at a loss for words and not knowing how to hold her body when meeting and trying to interact with a disabled man in a wheelchair. She analyzes her own bodily felt discomfort and asserts that accounts of social oppression ought to be linked with “the experiential field upon which the visceral register plays” (p. 20). Her analysis of the intersection of culture, race, and power dynamics in this setting is further grounded in a study of the history of Durham and the wider United Methodist Church. Her interpretation accounts for the ways in which the local church’s embodied practices of worship and hospitality both meet and fail to meet its theological goals.

This study is especially valuable for pastoral theologians who value embodied experience and seek to overcome social oppression. This kind of visceral reflection helps draw back the curtain from what the author calls “obliviousness” to race and dis/ability. It reveals the incorporated character of white privilege and able‐bodied privilege, and how these “can co‐exist with belief in equality and (Christian) inclusiveness” (McClintock Fulkerson 2007, p. 20). Taking both beliefs and enacted practices seriously, McClintock Fulkerson’s study lifts up “the primacy of the situation for theological reflection” (p. 235). She notes that theology alone cannot tell us what is necessary for “redemptive alteration” (p. 254); needed are creative attempts to work with the available bits and pieces of inherited tradition to interrupt dominant groups’ obliviousness. Grace, too, takes place in the context of a (this)‐worldly church.

A third example of research associated with the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network is pastoral theologian Eileen Campbell‐Reed’s (2016) noteworthy study, Anatomy of a Schism, which, while not strictly speaking an ethnography, employs qualitative methods of study and highlights the issue of representation. Campbell‐Reed relies upon her extensive interviews with five Baptist clergywomen to forge a new interpretation of the schism of the Southern Baptist Convention (1979–2000). Through a close reading of the five clergywomen’s stories, Campbell‐Reed narrates the struggle within the Southern Baptist Convention between theological Biblicists and Autonomists, highlighting the gendered, psychological, and theological dimensions of the schism. Her layered interpretation describes the history of the Southern Baptist Convention and its contested views of gender complementarity. The author articulates the psychological dimensions of “splitting,” understood as both an intra‐psychic experience and the historical event of the schism, and draws out implications for theology and evolving meanings of ministry. Similar to McClintock Fulkerson, Campbell‐Reed concludes with an emphasis on the creativity needed to go forward in faithful living, which involves challenging the “dehumanization of the disempowered” (Campbell‐Reed, 2016, p. 145).

The feminist commitments of the author are evident in her choice of participants and her focus on their stories as a lens through which to view the larger historical struggle. In presenting clergywomen as complex historical actors and not just the subject of Southern Baptist debates over the ordination of women, Campbell‐Reed breaks through the taken‐for‐granted knowledge of much previous scholarship. In retelling religious history from the point of view of those whose voices have been marginalized, the study participates in the narrative stream in qualitative research as well.

The Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network continues to generate much exciting scholarship, demonstrating a range of positions on issues of normativity, reflexivity, and representation. Natalie Wigg‐Stevenson, who calls her work “ethnographic theology,” helps push forward the question of how “ethnographic methods can help us foster the already organic relationship between everyday and academic theologies” (Wigg‐Stevenson, 2014, p. 11). Pastoral and practical theologians, always working at integration of theory and practice, have much to learn from this conversation.

Narrative Approaches to Qualitative Research

The third stream of work within the ethnography and qualitative research trajectory is the one that I find the most compelling and simultaneously the most difficult to describe. I am calling it narrative qualitative research because it foregrounds the development of personal and social narratives as sites of transformation. This work draws upon insights of the field of narrative therapy (White and Epston, 1990) and the recognition that hegemonic cultural narratives can control and distort our human stories and lives. In order to redress the political power of such destructive cultural stories, researchers are deliberately using ethnographic and qualitative study to lift up alternative stories, stories that are life‐giving and oriented toward relational justice (Graham, 1992). This stream of work also embraces the position of Denzin and Lincoln that “the interpretive practice of making sense of one’s findings is both artistic and political” (2011, p. 15). The prophetic, therapeutic, and artistic dimensions of these studies are what make them so compelling to me.

One example is Kathleen Greider’s (2007) landmark volume, Much Madness is Divinest Sense, which takes an exploratory approach to understanding psychiatric illness in a way that goes beyond positivist explanations. Not a field study, this investigation analyzes the published memoirs of 18 religiously diverse “soul‐sufferers” (Greider’s term for those who suffer from psychiatric illness). From their memoirs she draws rich descriptions of issues of identity, suffering, care, and healing. Greider asserts that we must take into consideration the ways in which “the sickness of society sometimes causes or complicates the sickness of persons” (p. 93). While Greider does not explicitly draw upon narrative theory in this text, I classify it here because the text does the work of narrative practice in that it deconstructs both popular and medical explanations of madness, explores what insiders have to say, and “thickens” the cultural story by describing the daunting social conditions that contribute to or exacerbate the suffering of persons with psychiatric conditions and their families. By focusing on the spiritual wisdom found in the memoirists’ accounts, Greider honors the hard‐won wisdom and God‐given “divinest sense” that the poet Emily Dickinson (1890), herself a soul‐sufferer, named. The artistic dimension of interpretation is also on view in this study, both in its reference to poetry and in the very use of memoirs as the basis for study. The beauty and power of the personal accounts conveys the authority of insiders to tell their own stories and transports the reader into a more experience‐near understanding of the gifts and challenges in soul‐sufferers’ experiences.

A salient new contribution to the narrative research stream is We Are Not All Victims, by Pamela Couture (2016). Based on ethnographic research in Kamina, Democratic Republic of Congo, from 2003 to 2014, this book tells an alternative story of the peacemaking activities of the people of Kamina and their religious leaders. Couture’s account is based on the recorded (and in some cases, translated) testimonies of 78 persons who publicly bore witness to the Luba struggle, along with numerous qualitative interviews and prolonged periods of participant observation. Remarking on the tendency of Western authors to interpret Congolese life only in terms of violence, intrigue, victims, and perpetrators, Couture writes:

In contrast, the alternative story shows the Luba as agents of their own peacebuilding, using both indigenous and Christian religion as warrants for peace, and engaging in these activities inland, where people live ordinary lives and rise to extraordinary courage when the times call for it.

(Couture, 2016, p. 4)

Couture deliberately prioritizes the multiple and rich stories that the people tell her about their lives, their experiences of the conflict, and their efforts to build peace. Her narrative offers a striking contrast to extant histories and journalism related to the area.

Couture’s methodology relies explicitly upon two narrative therapy concepts: the importance of social witness and recognition; and the therapeutic value of contributing to a cause that is larger than oneself (Combs and Freedman, 1996; Couture, 2016). Couture positioned herself first as a ghost writer attempting to tell the people’s story faithfully, from their point of view. Later, after years of research, getting to know the people, and working with them on drafts of the book, she came to see her role rather as “their spirit‐writer: my spirit, mutyima muyampe, literally, my thinking heart, accompanies their muya, literally, their soul, in these words” (Couture, 2016, p. 18). Couture now recognizes that this is a collaborative story that expresses her own voice and “thinking heart” as well as the voices and souls of the people who have opened their lives to her.

Couture’s research might thus be considered a form of narrative pastoral care in that it anticipates the impact of the research upon the people and the readers for whom it is written. Narrative theory emphasizes people’s authority over their own stories, and the therapeutic value of sharing such richly developed stories with other persons and groups.

A choice that Couture has made along these lines is to house her digital interviews and other primary source material in the Drew University archives so that future scholars can have access to them. In particular, she wants the interviews to be available to Congolese scholars so that they can reinterpret them from the original languages.4

Work in the narrative stream also overlaps with the intercultural and postcolonial trajectory in pastoral theology. Melinda McGarrah Sharp points out the likelihood of “misunderstanding stories” taking place when people attempt to communicate across cultural boundaries, due to the legacy of colonialism that has tacitly influenced even well‐meaning institutions such as Christian missions and the Peace Corps (McGarrah Sharp, 2014, p. 3). This presents a conundrum for qualitative researchers, who—like many of the above authors—must contend with the challenge of writing stories in ways that accurately and fairly represent their research partners, without idealization or condescension. Other tensions for researchers attempting to coauthor stories include tensions between voice and silence, and questions of who can speak in a given situation. As McGarrah Sharp points out, while on the one hand there is the danger of speaking for others, on the other there is the danger of remaining silent, if that means ignoring pressing social concerns in local or global communities (2014, p. 127). Further reflections on postcolonial pastoral theology can be found in Emmanuel Lartey’s essay in this volume (Chapter 4).

Why Practice Matters

Having reviewed these three overlapping approaches within the trajectory of qualitative research, I turn now to making a case as to why the study of religious practice matters for students and scholars of pastoral theology and care. Given that the field foregrounds human experience as a starting place for theological reflection, it makes sense to continue to study religious practices in situ, attending to the lived experiences of diverse persons and groups in their historical and socio‐cultural contexts, as well as to explore their first‐person published accounts. In the same way in which many pastoral theologians in the past (and some in the present) have found that staying active in a pastoral counseling practice keeps their teaching about pastoral counseling honest, pastoral theologians now need to continue to read and engage in qualitative studies in order to stay honest and informed about the social and political dimensions of lived religion. In order to teach and practice pastoral care that helps more than it hurts, we need ethnographic and qualitative research studies that illumine the embodied experience of persons and groups in their cultural complexity and evaluate the impact of religious practices. Pastoral ethnography and qualitative research force us to see social realities to which we might otherwise be oblivious, and in this way help the field promote more intelligent, sensitive, and life‐giving forms of care.