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Theology as social activity: theological action research and teaching the knowledge of Christian ethics and practical ministry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2021

Daniel P. Rhodes
Daniel P. Rhodes*
Affiliation:
Institute of Pastoral Studies, Loyola University Chicago, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: drhodes1@luc.edu
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Abstract

Theological Action Research (TAR) is a way of doing and teaching theology and forming students that surmounts the problems associated with both formal theologies and theological ethnographies. Drawing from models of action research developed in other fields, this paper outlines an approach to teaching practical ministry grounded in a collaborative mode of inquiry capable of generating new insights into humanity's relation to God while also engendering the ethical-political powers that give shape to collective life. As a process of what anthropologist Lia Haro calls eth-o-graphy, Christian formation and knowledge production cannot be disconnected from cooperative participation in communities of practice dedicated to this kind of social, ecclesial activity. The paper goes on to describe how the author has begun to implement this TAR model at a Catholic, Jesuit institution, offering some promising preliminary findings on the potential it holds for training ministry students.

Keywords

action researchethnographypedagogytheological educationtheology and ethics
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 73 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 340 - 357
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2021

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References

1 As Milbank contends, ‘The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease, because once theology surrenders its claim to be a meta-discourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol, such as historical scholarship, humanist psychology, or transcendental philosophy.’ Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Tanner, Kathryn, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 38–58.

3 More than Milbank, Healy contends with Hauerwas’ view of the church. One presumes this is because Hauerwas tends to write more directly about the church as a social body, while Milbank tends to focus more on ontology. Nevertheless, Healy's description of ‘blueprint ecclesiologies’ would seem to apply to Milbank's theoretical ecclesiology. See Healy, Nicholas M., Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 In a North American context, field education and contextual education are used fairly synonymously, though the usage of contextual education is newer. Both arise from a heightened focus on professional education within theological education beginning in the 1960s and thus a focus on practical training that goes beyond the classroom. For a very short account of the origins, development and purpose of field education, see Floding, Matthew, ‘What is Theological Field Education?’, in Floding, Matthew (ed.), Welcome to Theological Field Education! (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. 1–16Google Scholar. The more recent use of ‘contextual education’ reflects the ongoing influence of educational studies on the discipline of practical ministry. As Elaine Johnson recounts, within the field of educational studies contextual teaching and learning grew out of a grassroots movement of educators (associated with the 1983 study ‘A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform’ and an initiative launched by the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) to focus on applied learning in an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of traditional education. A strong emphasis on learning in context and the principle that knowing cannot be divorced from doing characterises this movement. See Johnson, Elaine B., Contextual Teaching and Learning: What It Is and Why It's Here to Stay (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2002), pp. 1–20Google Scholar.

5 There is a groundswell of new literature emerging in the intersecting and overlapping fields of critical ethnography, post-critical ethnography and public or engaged anthropology. For an introduction to this scholarship, see Peter R. Freebody, Qualitative Research in Education: Interaction and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003); D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2012); and George W. Noblit, Susana Y. Flores and Enrique G. Murillo, Jr. (eds), Postcritical Ethnography: Reinscribing Critique (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004). For a discussion of some of these trends in cultural anthropology, see Stuart Kirsch, Engaged Anthropology: Politics Beyond the Text (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018) and Louise Lamphere, ‘The Convergence of Applied, Practicing, and Public Anthropology in the 21st Century’, Human Organization 63/4 (2004), pp. 431–43. Any interdisciplinary essay such as this runs the risk of being clumsy in its terms. Admittedly, to the outsider, it is nearly impossible to delineate the fine distinctions between the emerging micro- and subfields in ethnography, education and cultural anthropology. For the purposes of this paper, I draw from post-critical ethnography, engaged anthropology and, most centrally, action research, simply because those have shaped my own learning. I invite other scholars to investigate more how novel fusions between these disciplines might produce even more dynamic pedagogical possibilities.

6 On the compatibility of critical ethnography and PAR, see Julie Hemment, ‘Public Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Participation: Participatory Action Research and Critical Ethnography in Provincial Russia’, Human Organization 66/3 (2007), pp. 301–14.

7 Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life, p. 155.

8 Ibid., pp. 21, 46.

9 Ibid., pp. 167–8.

10 John Milbank, ‘Enclaves, or Where is the Church?’, New Blackfriars 73/861 (June 1992), p. 344.

11 Scharen, ‘Judicious Narratives’, pp. 142, 125.

12 Ibid., p. 131.

13 Ibid., p. 133.

14 An account of this turn is offered in Christian Scharen and Anna Marie Vigen (eds), Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011). See also Elizabeth Phillips, ‘Charting the “Ethnographic Turn”: Theologians and the Study of Christian Congregations’, in Peter Ward (ed.), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 95–106.

15 The quoted phrase is taken from Fulkerson's essay ‘Interpreting a Situation: When is “Empirical” Also “Theological”?’, in Ward, Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, p. 136. But I think this encapsulates well the entirety of her ethnography of Good Samaritan United Methodist Church in Places of Redemption: A Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: OUP, 2007).

16 Andrea Vicini, ‘Living with Indigenous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico: The Transformative Power of Poverty and Suffering’, in Scharen and Vigen, Ethnography as Christian Theology, pp. 161–83.

17 Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: CUP, 2015).

18 Scharen and Vigen, Ethnography as Christian Theology, p. 74.

19 Jessica Nina Lester and Allison Daniel Anders, ‘Engaging Ethics in Postcritical Ethnography: Troubling Transparency, Trustworthiness, and Advocacy’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 19/3 (Sept. 2018), p. 24 and Madison, Critical Ethnography, 6.

20 Lourdes Ortega, ‘Methodology, Epistemology, and Ethics in Instructed SLA Research: An Introduction’, Modern Language Journal 89/3 (2005), p. 317.

21 Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

22 On the cultural logic of late capitalism, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). On isolated interpretivism see Bill J. Johnston, ‘Critical Theory, Critical Ethnography, Critical Conditions: Considerations of Postcritical Ethnography’, in Noblit et al., Postcritical Ethnography, p. 70.

23 I see a strong overlap between thinkers as divergent as Milbank and Foucault here. Indeed, one could nearly describe the unifying thread of Foucault's work as an investigation of the new technologies of capture and oppression engendered by modernity.

24 Kathy Hytten, ‘Postcritical Ethnography: Research as a Pedagogical Encounter’, in Noblit et al., Postcritical Ethnography, p. 96.

25 Lester and Anders, ‘Engaging Ethics in Postcritical Ethnography’, pp. 18–20.

26 I am deeply indebted to Lia Haro for these notions of monologue and evasions of dialogue. For more on the place of these distorting practices in anthropology and ethnography, see Lia Haro, ‘The End(s) of the End of Poverty’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2014), p. 357.

27 Noblit et al., ‘Postcritical Ethnography: An Introduction’, in Postcritical Ethnography, p. 3.

28 Some researchers are turning to intersubjective encounter and narrative research as a way of engaging that disrupts the hegemonic knowledge-power structures that have long plagued anthropology. See Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), particularly ch. 4. One narrative discipline that seeks to promote more dialogical encounter is testimonio. See John Beverley, ‘Testimonio, Subalternity and Narrative Authority’, in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds), The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), pp. 547–58.

29 Hytten, ‘Postcritical Ethnography’, p. 100. One example of a view of theological ethnography that repeats this problem is Luke Bretherton's appeal to Michael Burawoy's ‘extended case method’ in his attempt to interrelate the micro and macro levels in interpretation. While such an approach may provide a way to reassess theory, it seems to fail to locate a place for formation or the involvement of the community in its process of coming to judgement. See Luke Bretherton, ‘Coming to Judgment: Methodological Reflections on the Relationship Between Ecclesiology, Ethnography and Political Theory’, Modern Theology 28/2 (Apr. 2012), pp. 167–96; and his ‘Generating Christian Political Theory and the Uses of Ethnography’, in Ward, Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, pp. 145–66.

30 Hytten, ‘Postcritical Ethnography’, p. 99. Similarly, scholars in the nascent field of ‘engaged anthropology’ share the objective of making ‘constructive interventions into politics’; see Kirsch, Engaged Anthropology, p. 1.

31 Johnston, ‘Critical Theory and Critical Ethnography’, p. 63; and Noblit et al., ‘Postcritical Ethnography: An Introduction’, p. 24.

32 David H. Tripp, ‘Socially Critical Action Research’, Theory into Practice 29/3 (Summer 1990), p. 159. Schein attests to the transformational, collaborative nature of action research already announced in ‘Lewin's dictum that you cannot understand an organization until you try to change it through a process of high researcher and high subject involvement’. Edgar H. Schein, ‘Clinical Inquiry/Research’, in Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (eds), Handbook of Action Research: The Concise Paperback Edition (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2006), p. 187.

33 Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (eds), The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, 2nd edn (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), p. 4.

34 Orlando Fals Borda, ‘Participatory (Action) Research in Social Theory: Origins and Challenges’, Handbook of Action Research, pp. 27–37.

35 Romand Coles, ‘Transforming the Game: Democratizing the Publicness of Higher Education and Commonwealth in Neoliberal Times’, New Political Science 36/4 (2014), pp. 629–30. A similar articulation is offered by John Heron and Peter Reason in ‘The Practice of Co-operative Inquiry: Research “with” rather than “on” People’, in Handbook of Action Research, pp. 144–5. According to Coles, action research goes beyond praxis in that it is reducible neither to application of theoretical concepts nor understanding derived from practice alone. It is instead engaged collaborative research in practice and action.

36 Romand Coles and Blasé Scarnati, ‘“Sing us a New Song” – Listening to the Heartbeat of Democratic Transformation at Northern Arizona University’, a white paper (unpublished), p. 5.

37 Coles discusses this dynamic at length, emerging from his own work at Northern Arizona University, in Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 49–58.

38 Coles, ‘Transforming the Game’, pp. 623–4.

39 Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (New York: Verso, 2013), pp. 269–70.

40 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th anniversary edn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014 [1984]), pp. 48, 73, 80.

41 Mary Brydon-Miller, Davydd Greenwood and Patricia Maguire, ‘Why Action Research?’, Action Research 1/1 (2003), pp. 11, 20.

42 Ernest T. Stringer, Action Research, 4th edn (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2014), p. 15; see also Egon G. Guba's ‘Foreword’ in this same volume.

43 I am deeply indebted to Lia Haro and Romand Coles for teaching me to understand action research this way. Lia has developed this term based on her own ethnographic research and critical anthropological study. Additionally, I suggest that viewing PAR this way allows for including the real concerns of the ‘turn to affect’ as part of a broader recognition that ‘there is a need not just for different kinds of thinking but for an alternative ethos, mood, or disposition’ within the academy and scholarship itself. See Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, (eds), Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 10. This is not to dismiss critical inquiry, but to realise that such critical inquiry has failed to generate the kinds of formative communities capable of purposeful response to the larger forces at play because it has failed to make any real contact with a public its proponents tend to view as deluded and inept at grasping the realities of their situation (see p. 19). Eth-o-graphy intentionally stresses the process of community-building for transformative practice.

44 The work of Romand Coles at Northern Arizona University and their Action Research Teams (ARTs) programme was the model I took for my own design. See Coles, ‘Transforming the Game’. For theological educators, particularly within Catholic schools, one can see the very strong links already to liberation theology inherent to this pedagogical approach. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. and ed. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson, 15th anniversary edn (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988 [1974]), particularly part 4, section 2.

45 On the role of communities of practice in new learning, see Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); and Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William M. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

46 Clare Watkins, ‘Practising Ecclesiology: From Product to Process: Developing Ecclesiology as a Non-Correlative Process and Practice through the Theological Action Research Framework of Theology in Four Voices’, Ecclesial Practices 2 (2015), p. 38. Watkins is part of the ARCS team at Heythrop College and is co-author of the first book-length engagement with TAR. See Helen Cameron, Deborah Bhatti, Catherine Duce, James Sweeney and Clare Watkins, Talking about God in Practice: Theological Action Research and Practical Theology (London: SCM Press, 2010).

47 As the philosopher C. S. Peirce recognised, people are engaged in abduction all the time, as it is a natural part of how humans negotiate their world. As expounded by Peirce, abduction, or the bringing together of inductive investigation and deductive theoretical speculation, is simply a way of naming this iterative process. See C. S. Pierce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 226–41. Similarly, Romand Coles dilates his own form of what he calls ‘visionary pragmatism’ in his book by that name (see n. 37 above)

48 Freire, Pedagogy, pp. 97ff.

49 Elaine Graham, ‘Is Practical Theology a Form of “Action Research”?’ International Journal of Practical Theology 17/1 (2013), pp. 150, 171. While greatly influenced by Graham's account of TAR and even, as will become evident below, her turn to Ignatian spirituality at the end of this essay (following David Coghlan), I continue to find her presentation (and his) of TAR to be missing an overarching political (or theo-political) and christological frame sufficient to give substance to the ethical formation she so rightly outlines.

50 On the ascendency of neoliberal reason, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), pp. 17–45.

51 Though he makes no appeal to theology, I take this notion of transforming the game from Romand Coles, ‘Transforming the Game’, pp. 622–39.

52 Graham, ‘Practical Theology’, pp. 163, 177.

53 Graham turns to Coghlan at the conclusion of her discussion of practical theology and action research, and I am deeply indebted to her for alerting me to Coghlan's scholarship. For Graham, this allows her to suggest a way of viewing TAR that connects the methods and convictions of action research to ‘a systematic articulation of the values and world-view’ of Christian theism, not all that different from what I am suggesting. See Graham, ‘Practical Theology’, p. 174.

54 David Coghlan, ‘Seeking God in All Things: Ignatian Spirituality as Action Research’, The Way 43/4 (Jan. 2004), p. 97.

55 Ibid., p. 101.

56 Coghlan, David, ‘Ignatian Spirituality as Transformational Social Science’, Action Research 3/1 (2005), p. 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 See Adolfo Nicolás, ‘Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today’, remarks for Networking Jesuit Higher Education: Shaping the Future for a Human, Just, and Sustainable Globe, Mexico City (23 Apr. 2010), p. 7: http://www.sjweb.info/documents/ansj/100423_Mexico%20City_Higher%20Education%20Today_ENG.pdf.

58 See Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, ‘The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education’, address delivered at Santa Clara University, 6 Oct. 2000, in Faith, Justice, and American Higher Education 31/1 (Jan. 2001), pp. 13–29; reprinted in Traub, George W. (ed.), A Jesuit Education Reader (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2008), pp. 144–62Google Scholar

59 Ibid., p. 159.

60 Stringer, Action Research, p. xvi. The notion of corporate pedagogy has strong connections to the form of practical theology developed by Edward Farley; see his ‘Interpreting Situations: An Inquiry into the Nature of Practical Theology’, in Lewis S. Mudge and James N. Poling (eds), Formation and Reflection: The Promise of Practical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 17–18.

61 I am deeply grateful to the Association of Theological Schools whose generous support offered the resources to investigate and construct the theological action research programme I describe. I am also profoundly indebted to Romand Coles, Lia Haro, Therese Lysaught and Tim Conder for their help in thinking through this essay and their thoughtful comments on early drafts. A version of this paper was presented at the 2020 meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics in Washington, DC. I am also thankful for the insightful comments and discussion offered by those in attendance.