Abstract This article considers how Catholics contending with infertility navigate postconciliar currents related to magisterial authority, Catholic identity, and ecclesial belonging. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with lay Catholics, it explores the burdens presented by infertility and the treatments that Catholics pursue. It argues that varied understandings of Catholic identity and magisterial authority set Catholics on divergent pathways of family formation aligned with or departing from official Church teaching. Both paths can, I argue, be understood under the framing of conscience, which poses ecclesial challenges related to magisterial authority and the role of lay moral discernment. These challenges pervade lay-led Catholic infertility ministries, which tend to attract Catholics following magisterial teaching and may alienate those who depart from it. Even as Pope Francis’ synodal spirit attends to Catholics in “irregular situations,” dynamics of scandal and silence contribute to the lack of support groups for Catholics who opt for ivf .
Abstract This article considers the challenges associated with attempting to combine rigour and relevance when conducting commissioned research for church institutions. To illustrate these challenges, the author reflects on his experiences as a researcher and consultant working beyond the academy who needs to balance the pragmatic needs and concerns of clients with appropriate academic rigour. In considering whether he has been faithfully improvising or ‘winging it’, he examines his professional practice against two criteria for ‘faithful’ commissioned research – faithfulness to qualitative research and faithfulness to practical theology. The article concludes by arguing that bridging the scholar-practitioner divide requires steering a path between two contrasting risks. The first risk is failing to adequately address the pragmatic ‘so what?’ questions of practitioners and commissioners. The second is being too eager to address pragmatic considerations without conducting research in a sufficiently critical or rigorous manner.
Abstract This article1 examines the contextual norms of academic writing in practical and ethnographic theology by analysing the works of Heather Walton and Natalie Wigg-Stevenson through the lens of the ‘plain style.’ This style emphasizes clarity, neutrality, and detachment, avoiding personal voice, metaphor, narrative, and emotion. In contrast, both authors deliberately transgress these conventions. By promoting theology as poetics, incorporating autoethnography, personal journals, and theology as performance art, they blur the boundaries between professional and private, church and academy, scholarship and activism—drawing on life writing, metaphor, affect, and embodied experience. Their work provokes both enthusiasm and criticism in Nordic and German contexts: some regard it as innovative and necessary, while others question whether it still meets the standards of rigorous academic research. The article argues for the recognition of diverse methodological and stylistic approaches, understanding borders not as fixed but as negotiable. By challenging conventions, practical theology, conceptualized as a practice, may broaden its capacity for dialogue, representation, and transformative insight.
