Browsing by Author "Fulkerson, Mary McClintock"

In this dissertation, I develop a theological account of human embodiment by exploring the relationship between the liturgical practices of an Episcopal parish during Lent and Easter and church members’ bodies. My objective was to analyze the normative constructions of saved bodies at work in seasons that call attention to the body while also emphasizing sin, repentance, and salvation. I conducted qualitative research at a church in the American South using ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, and I analyzed the body postures, gestures, movements, sensory experiences, and corporeal interactions that constituted the community’s liturgical practices as well as members’ personal experiences of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter in 2014. By examining the philosophical, theological, and social layers of how the church inhabited these seasons, I discovered that church members’ participation entailed implicit conceptions of bodies as malleable, as journeys, and as sensorially interactive, which are conceptions that tend to conflict with modern Western ideals of bodies as solid, whole, and independent from one another as well as from their surroundings. Yet rather than seeking to suppress these dimensions of embodiment, the church’s practices made bodily malleability, journeying, and sensory interaction normative for the bodily shape of salvation.

"Imaging Church" examines the impact of visual practices on a religious community's ecclesiology. I argue that visual practices potentially encourage others to perceive the church differently and participate in the mission of a community to which they do not belong. Employing ethnographic research and material analysis, I investigate the visual practices of the Congregation of St. Joseph, a Roman Catholic women's religious community. Seven of communities of the Sisters of St. Joseph reconfigured in 2007 to form the Congregation of St. Joseph: the communities of LaGrange Park, Illinois; Tipton, Indiana; Wichita, Kansas; Nazareth, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; Wheeling, West Virginia; and the Médaille community which includes sisters in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Ohio.

My ethnographic research consisted of interviews and participant observation. Between May 2011 and May 2013, I interviewed 107 sisters in the Congregation as well as 17 individuals who were Congregation of St. Joseph Associates (non-vowed members) and/or employees of the Congregation. Interviews attended to the sisters' personal prayer lives, ministerial activities, congregational life and worship, congregational space, and the commodification of images. To gain an understanding of their visual practices, I worshiped with the sisters and observed several ministries. I employ material analysis to examine the influence of images created by and used in the Congregation. Analysis of particular images and spaces employed by the Congregation reveals the messages they articulate and potentially share with those who engage them.

To assess the centrality of practices for examining the ecclesiology and justice commitments of religious communities, the first chapter argues that the Sisters of St. Joseph in seventeenth century France and nineteenth century America articulated and dispersed their vision of the church through their practices (ministries and the production of commodities). These practices provide the foundation for the sisters' contemporary practices and the means through which they work for justice. The second chapter explores the sisters' charism (spirituality and mission) and commitment to justice and how these concepts are articulated in their congregational spaces. I argue that the sisters promote their mission through a visual archive which emphasizes their history and unity as a community, their chapels which display their belief and charism, and their public spaces which attempt to unify the Congregation's visual practices and extend these practices outside of their religious community.

The third chapter argues that the sisters employ visual practices in their spiritual lives and ministries to manifest their mission and to promote engagement with society. I examine these practices in relation to John Fuellenbach's concept of a theology of transformation. Analysis of the sisters' individual and communal prayer lives reveals the way visual practices assist in discerning identity and relationships. I further argue that the sisters' train others in their visual practices through their ministries, including their publications, retreats, and artwork produced in the Congregation. The fourth chapter examines how the Congregation's production of religious commodities evangelizes viewers and encourages participation in the sisters' mission for social and ecological justice. Through their business, the Ministry of the Arts, the Congregation employs religious commodities to assert a new perception of the church and world and invite others to commit to this vision. Through these visual practices in their prayer lives, congregational life, and ministries, the Congregation demonstrates the transformative potentiality of visual practices and offers techniques through which the church can pursue justice.

Abstract

There is a population of individuals classified as having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This group of people should be included in places of worship, the schools they attend and the communities where they reside. Consequently, they are sometimes excluded from some occurrences that others experience.

Utilizing personal stories (of successes and sometimes failures), ASD parent interviews and research, I will offer suggestions for inclusion and enlighten the areas where there tends to be exclusion. My focus is the church and how church leaders may become involved in the lives of ASD parishioners to enhance inclusion in not only the church, but the school and the community as well.

My research shows that ASD parents would like their children to experience church as they have. Although willing, most churches, may lack the ability to oblige for various reasons. Schools where inclusion is not encouraged, rests primarily on the shoulders of the principals. Like pastors in churches, principals in schools have influence and can spearhead inclusion efforts in their respective entities. Community entities are willing to accommodate ASD clientele and have done so when approached to comply.

I contend where any of these entities are not willing to foster inclusion, then the church can and most often should become involved to assist, with the necessary training. In other words, the church must do what the church has always done – stand up for those who are unable to do so for themselves.

Keywords: Autism, church, community, inclusion, parents, school

Abstract

There is a population of individuals classified as having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This group of people should be included in places of worship, the schools they attend and the communities where they reside. Consequently, they are sometimes excluded from some occurrences that others experience.

Utilizing personal stories (of successes and sometimes failures), ASD parent interviews and research, I will offer suggestions for inclusion and enlighten the areas where there tends to be exclusion. My focus is the church and how church leaders may become involved in the lives of ASD parishioners to enhance inclusion in not only the church, but the school and the community as well.

My research shows that ASD parents would like their children to experience church as they have. Although willing, most churches, may lack the ability to oblige for various reasons. Schools where inclusion is not encouraged, rests primarily on the shoulders of the principals. Like pastors in churches, principals in schools have influence and can spearhead inclusion efforts in their respective entities. Community entities are willing to accommodate ASD clientele and have done so when approached to comply.

I contend where any of these entities are not willing to foster inclusion, then the church can and most often should become involved to assist, with the necessary training. In other words, the church must do what the church has always done – stand up for those who are unable to do so for themselves.

Keywords: Autism, church, community, inclusion, parents, school

ABSTRACT

On the first day of November, ordinary commerce in Lithuania comes to a halt. Stores and offices are shuttered, while roads and cemeteries in cities and small villages come alive with the movement of families traversing the country to lay flowers and light candles at the graves of parents, grandparents, godparents, children, aunts, uncles, friends, and teachers. Velines is not a boisterous occasion like the Day of the Dead in Mexico, but it is not morose either. The cemetery is transformed into a place of reunion and remembrance as the gathered community exchanges greetings and gossip while cleaning cemetery plots, arranging flowers, and lighting candles atop the graves. Little children wander between the legs of adults; elderly men and women find resting places on benches and stones; vendors hawk candles at the entrances; and people steadily stream in and out through the gates. When the sun sets the candles flicker to life to form a cemetery on fire.

These Lithuanian Velines practices, though notable in their high level of participation, are not unique. To varying degrees All Saints' and All Souls' Day pilgrimage to cemeteries is common in many parts of what we now map as Europe. Yet these practices have a distinctive and powerful importance in Lithuania. The pervasiveness of death, suffering, loss, exile, and dislocation is a prominent aspect of the Lithuanian experience in the modern era. Significant as well is Lithuania's geographic location in a region fraught with the dynamics of the modern projects of empire, colonialism, and nationalism in all its varying forms. A central concern of the dissertation is the significance of Velines cemeteries and Velines practices for Lithuanians seeking to survive and find a way forward in the midst of the violence and upheaval of the past century, the attendant trauma, and the confusion and contestation over cultural memory that has followed.

Utilizing ethnographic method I explore Lithuanian Velines practices from the perspective of practical theology and material culture. Within Catholic liturgical theology All Saints' and All Souls' Day practices herald a powerful claim of participation in the communion of saints, an invocation of future eschatological hope, and for some, a promise of communion with those who are dead. Yet doctrinal and liturgical theology alone do not explain what is happening in these cemeteries. Rather, these cemetery spaces are framed by and shimmer with shards of Christian traditions while also hosting complex realities of human experience. Over the years these practices have been adapted and modified to construct and express important aspects of family, cultural identity, national belonging, and memory.

The dissertation is essentially a thick description of Velines and a theological inquiry into its power and significance. After the initial introduction the dissertation is divided into three parts, each part containing three chapters. Part I describes the people, places, and practices of Velines with chapters on history, cemeteries, and practices. Part II addresses the structures of social order that intertwine with and affect Velines practices in chapters on family, church, and state. Part III of the dissertation engages structures of spiritual struggle and includes chapters on trauma, memory, and hope.

My dissertation is a project of practical theology that starts with the problem of homelessnesss. It seeks to better understand the lived faith of homeless persons by listening to the voices of the extreme poor. It asserts that one common feature of homelessness is loss, particularly the loss of being accepted as fully human. This plays out in stigmatization and shame, whereby homeless persons are treated and can come to perceive themselves as transgressors matter out of place. Using an ethnographic method and a situational analysis of social worlds, I participated in and observed three homeless social worlds at a downtown church in Nashville: a midweek worship service, a street paper, and a weekly support group. I also used a photo-elicitation process to discover how the homeless found sacred spaces and held onto sacred things as they lived on the streets. Because it is important to understand the larger historic and socioeconomic forces and material realities impacting the lived faith of the homeless, I also describe the making of the places of Nashville, the church, and the three social worlds. Besides participation-observation fieldnotes, my data primarily came from interviews with 40 homeless and formerly homeless persons as well as the leaders of each social world. I conclude with a theological reading and evaluation of the church's homeless social worlds according to my own theological normative claims of the homeless person being beloved and nourishing a sense of his or her agency. Using Rowan Williams and Sandra Schneiders, I work toward an adequate definition of spirituality that allows for attention to the radically different lives of homeless persons who typically remain invisible to most Christians and academic theology, and I make a case for spirituality as a viable analytical concept in practical theology and as a discipline in theological education.

As Christians in the United States struggle to sustain hope in the face of global economic, environmental, military, and poverty crises, the most popular source of theological hope for preachers and congregations is that of Jürgen Moltmann and the Moltmannian hope that draws on his work. Moltmannian theology eschews close connections with more-canonically established doctrines of hope, claiming instead on a future-based, this-worldly eschatology that hopes in the God who suffers. An exclusive reliance on a Moltmannian theology of hope deprives the church of crucial resources for a robust eschatological hope and its practices. Critical attention to additional streams of of theologial hope, and to applicable discourses within and without Christian theology, provides the church with strength and resilience to sustain a distinctly Christian theological hope through and beyond disaster, despair, suffering, and death. Jesus Christ, the perfect hope, embodies the life -- earthly and eternal -- of humanity and its eschatological end, a life in which humans can participate, through grace and discipleship.

To make this argument, I survey characteristics of Moltmannian hope and then identify costs of a theological hope that relies exclusively on Moltmannia resources. I review a Patristic and Thomistic grammar of theological hope and its accompanying grammar of God; and I explore possible contributions to theological hope from an assortment of contemporary conversations outside conventionally-identified areas of Christian hope. I conclude with two suggestions for ecclesial formation of Christians in theological hope.

Over and over again, research has proven that good mentors are essential for the advancement of ministers-in-training. There is significant emerging research on the life-long impact that mentoring has on individuals who are preparing for vocational ministry. This work is written to mentors of ministers-in-training. In this dissertation, I will take a deep-dive into the emerging research. Particularly noteworthy is the work of Dr. Matthew Bloom at the University of Notre Dame study, Flourishing in Ministry. This research has shown that mentors are one of the most important factors in the well-being of a person in ministry (especially early on in the formation of a person in ministry). Role models and mentors shape an individual’s journey into ministry. In this work, I will closely examine four movements of transformational mentoring: selection, shepherding, sponsoring, and sending.

In the scriptures we are called into a new way of thinking about mentoring. I have leaned into the words of Romans 12:1-2 in this work. The Romans 12 model cautions us with “do not be conformed” and calls us instead to “be transformed.” Mentoring is not meant to be a model of duplication that leads to repetition of the same patterns. We are called to live outside of the predetermined mold and to live into transformation. Transformational Mentoring is the process of mentoring people to become that which we may not yet be able to see or know. They become more fully the person that God has created them to be, and in the process they learn to use their unique gifting in their ministry—they begin to flourish. Transformational mentoring allows an individual to fully be the person God has created them to be without the pressure of being duplicated into a particular expected mold. When a person is being transformed, they begin to live outside of the expectations imposed upon them, and they begin to see themselves through God’s lenses. For one to flourish in ministry, they must be invited into a process that allows for transformation to occur. Transformational mentoring allows God’s presence and power shape a person. Thus, creating something new and beautiful and healthy and flourishing.

This dissertation will engage in a historical-critical encounter with a peculiar subset of lived Christian traditions in the black Atlantic world, and the ways in which black theology as a disciplinary formation has only partly included these competing constructions of Christianity in their account of marginalized and marooned peoples. This project will do three things. First it will explore theoretically the construction of a black Atlantic world and re-establish a genealogy of lived Christian traditions in the black Atlantic world that takes seriously a set of movements emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century (primarily 1915-1955). These movements unsettled the monolithic depiction of the black church as western and primarily connected to a European or Euro-American theological tradition. The movements also help us to rethink the black Atlantic sphere as not simply the dispersion of African bodies to regions predominately bordering the Atlantic Ocean and the resulting demographic transformation of these new world spaces, but more appropriately as the collection of spaces (often exceeding the regions bordering the Atlantic) in which black cultures have been contested, shaped, and informed by the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and capitalism/modernity. It is my contention that by using the lenses of the black Atlantic and scripturalizing to return to this important archive of black Atlantic religious traditions we not only have access to the variety of black Christian experiences in a transnational frame, but we are able to redefine the scope of black theology and more fully engage the complex performances of black religious traditions in the public sphere.

The purpose of this study was to examine how African American women in ordained ministry construct and develop ministerial identity in the context of the Black Church. This study employed a qualitative multicase study methodology and the purposive participant sample was comprised of 13 women who were ordained or pursuing ordination in the Baltimore or Washington conferences of the AME Church. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with the participants, and member checks were employed as a triangulation method. This study reveals that the primary factor impacting ministerial identity development is the relationship with the senior pastor and explores the various ways in which that impact is felt. This study also connects aspects of that relationship and its resulting impact to African American cultural traditions and values, as well as offers several suggestions to women cultivating ministerial identity and the organizational systems within which that process occurs.