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.
Abstract This article presents qualitative research conducted with twenty Dutch Protestant Millennials regarding their involvement in local faith communities. Additionally, an online survey was distributed to supporters of the Dutch Evangelical Broadcasting Company (Evangelische Omroep) to provide broader context. Two key conclusions emerge from the study. First, for the Millennials in this research, church involvement is primarily about social interaction. They rely on a community to sustain their faith, with the church serving as a central source of spiritual renewal, particularly in relation to their everyday lives. The church community also functions as a safe space where they can both embody and explore their faith and doubts. Second, the respondents have high expectations for church services as a key avenue for their spiritual formation. They highly value a challenging sermon and an inclusive, open liturgy that connects with their daily experiences.
The shift to online and hybrid forms of Christian worship brought about by the C OvID-19 pandemic has persisted in many worshiping communities. This ethnographic panel study traces how Holy Week and Easter Sunday worship practices evolved between 2020 and 2023 in ten Roman Catholic, Anglican, mainstream Protestant, and Free Church congregations located in Toronto, Canada. Participant observation of forty-four online liturgies anchors a framework for analyzing hybrid worship practices as a tension between prioritizing online and in-person participants and using technology in ways that integrate online and in-person worshipers or serve these communities separately. Interviews with congregational leaders reveal four factors that shape decisions about online worship across Christian traditions: theological principles, pastoral concerns, practicalities, and polity. This framework and these factors invite Christians across traditions into conversation with one another in the face of a hybrid liturgical future.
Ecclesiologists are increasingly turning to the theory of sociologist Hartmut Rosa to resource their analysis of congregations about broader social change. Rosa's concepts of `acceleration' and `resonance' are especially noteworthy, in addition to his call for the `dynamic stabilization' of organizations, acknowledging greater effort required to maintain the status quo. In our narrative, Rosa's theorizing is applied to understanding the ecclesial practices of Robert H. Schuller (b.1g26 - d.2015), a Dutch Reformed megachurch pastor located in Southern California widely known for his global television program Hour of Power and the church building he named the Crystal Cathedral. Our reading of Rosa applies his theory to analytically describe Schuller's aggressive and innovative approach to church management and public preaching. Rosa's theoretical framework articulates Schuller's ministry philosophy as both shaped by and responding to core elements of modernity, which may be helpful to ecclesially concerned theologians.
In qualitative research, researchers and participants must understand each other. In hermeneutics, empathy is typically presented as the road to that understanding. In this article, we ask what empathy is and how empathy can contribute to the knowledge needed for practical theology. We also consider empathy between people who communicate in very different ways, such as when a non-speaking autistic person communicates with a speaking non-autistic person. By drawing on insights from philosophy, counseling, and social sciences and by discussing markers of linguistic and non-linguistic empathy, we work towards a theological account of empathy that is practically relevant in research and other situations.
Abstract In qualitative research, researchers and participants must understand each other. In hermeneutics, empathy is typically presented as the road to that understanding. In this article, we ask what empathy is and how empathy can contribute to the knowledge needed for practical theology. We also consider empathy between people who communicate in very different ways, such as when a non-speaking autistic person communicates with a speaking non-autistic person. By drawing on insights from philosophy, counseling, and social sciences and by discussing markers of linguistic and non-linguistic empathy, we work towards a theological account of empathy that is practically relevant in research and other situations.
The shift to online and hybrid forms of Christian worship brought about by the covid -19 pandemic has persisted in many worshiping communities. This ethnographic panel study traces how Holy Week and Easter Sunday worship practices evolved between 2020 and 2023 in ten Roman Catholic, Anglican, mainstream Protestant, and Free Church congregations located in Toronto, Canada. Participant observation of forty-four online liturgies anchors a framework for analyzing hybrid worship practices as a tension between prioritizing online and in-person participants and using technology in ways that integrate online and in-person worshipers or serve these communities separately. Interviews with congregational leaders reveal four factors that shape decisions about online worship across Christian traditions: theological principles, pastoral concerns, practicalities, and polity. This framework and these factors invite Christians across traditions into conversation with one another in the face of a hybrid liturgical future.
In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, demographic changes call for new strategies to integrate groups of newcomers in already existing parishes. In 2019, Skalborg, a rapidly growing parish on the outskirts of the city of Aalborg, together with the independent organization Kirkefondet and Centre for Pastoral Education and Research, initiated the project ‘Church with Newcomers’ that seeks to involve new citizens actively in creating relevant forms of church in a new city district. The evaluation of the project team made clear that openness and inclusiveness were seen as core qualities of the project that indicated that this was church. The article explores how the collaborative design and culture of the project team have contributed to realizing the project’s aim. We argue that working with space-making practices may point to fruitful ways of realizing participatory ecclesiology in a changing folk church setting.
In academic theology, prayer is often relegated to the theologian's private life.I What happens when prayer is integrated in a theologian's ethnographic research, challenging this divide? In this paper, I explore my experience of reading my own interview transcriptions from research with women in Palestine, utilizing the practice of lectio divina. This form of contemplative prayer forces the reader to slow down and meditate on the text, rather than solely engaging the transcription through an analytical frame. In this way, the words of the interview transcription are engaged as more than information and data; in the context of contemplative prayer, the insights of those I spoke with mediate God's presence. I further suggest that lectio divina encourages the researcher to continue to encounter her `informants' as full persons, even during the `analysis' stage of her project, as well as calls her to grapple with how this (re)encounter with the interviewee in the transcription may require her to move beyond writing to engage in concrete acts of solidarity.
Abstract In academic theology, prayer is often relegated to the theologian’s private life.1 What happens when prayer is integrated in a theologian’s ethnographic research, challenging this divide? In this paper, I explore my experience of reading my own interview transcriptions from research with women in Palestine, utilizing the practice of lectio divina. This form of contemplative prayer forces the reader to slow down and meditate on the text, rather than solely engaging the transcription through an analytical frame. In this way, the words of the interview transcription are engaged as more than information and data; in the context of contemplative prayer, the insights of those I spoke with mediate God’s presence. I further suggest that lectio divina encourages the researcher to continue to encounter her ‘informants’ as full persons, even during the ‘analysis’ stage of her project, as well as calls her to grapple with how this (re)encounter with the interviewee in the transcription may require her to move beyond writing to engage in concrete acts of solidarity.
Scholars have written extensively on theological ethnographic research. Comparatively little has been written about theological ethnographic representations. Despite influential efforts since 2011 to move methods of theological ethnographic research toward an incarnate mode, the genres of theological ethnographic representation have not similarly advanced. This article argues: 1) That limiting theological ethnographic representations to the genre of the social-scientific case study or treatise risks replicating the analytical violence ethnography was designed to fight against; 2) That if we write in such a way that an abstract such as this one conveys the fullness of our written representation, we have failed to fulfill the obligations of the ethnographic task. Ethnography ought to be non-abstractable; this abstract should fall short. It then proposes two necessary qualities for theological ethnographic writing: 1) Writing in ways that needs to be read; 2) Writing in ways that can be read. I then proceed to get emotional.
While many scholars insist that liturgical theology emerges from the vital plurality of a diversity of people who worship God together, much writing about Christian worship is animated by the “normate,” an elusive universal human that does not actually exist but for whom Christian liturgical ideals are conjured. In this article, I describe temptation by this figure that I experience in my own teaching and writing, a seduction that occurs even within a profound conversion to the vital importance of human difference in worship. I then suggest reflexive ethnographic fieldwork as a way of summoning “the holy many,” disclosing and turning from the normate, and practicing anti-ableism in both worship and liturgical writing. I offer ethnographic teaching and writing as a resource for shaping a pluralistic and liberatory imagination in liturgical studies and argue that recursive practices of seeking out the presence of the many in fieldwork, in writing, and in teaching ethnographic methods are necessary for disclosing the normate and for continuous conversion to the many.
This article explores the interconnections between writing on addiction, Dante’s Comedy , and theological commitments. The narratives of addicted persons and recovery coaches come into creative play with the literature of Dante and the theological positions of Aquinas. This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of what transformation entails in the harrowing of the hell of the addiction and the hope for resurrection.
