Browsing by Subject "Practical theology"
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Item Open Access Adaptive Church: A Practical Theology of Adaptive Work in the Pacific Northwest(2020) Benac, DustinThis dissertation explores the conceptual frameworks, social structures, and practices that organize communities of faith during periods of adaptive change. Combining methods and theories from qualitative research, practical theology, and organizational theory, it undertakes an extended study of two cases in the Pacific Northwest that are responding to adaptive challenges through collaborative approaches to religious organization, education, and leadership. Three interrelated questions organize a descriptive and normative inquiry: (1) What are the challenges confronting communities of faith in a context marked by religious entrepreneurship and a marginal social position for religious organizations? (2) What patterns of actual communal life, organizational structure, and leadership practice (both theoretical and empirical) best support individuals’ and communities’ engagement with the challenges they face? And (3) What implications follow for the practice of leadership and the study of religious organization amid periods of institutional change? An in-depth analysis of the two cases, which are identified as ‘hubs,’ extrapolates a response to the latter two questions, noting the challenges, social structure, practical wisdom, and practices of leadership that organize each site. This dissertation argues ecclesial imagination and Christian practical wisdom order and nurture the conditions, collaborations, and forms of leadership that enable each hub’s adaptive response, thereby enabling communities to live in light of the reality and promises of God.
Four parts encompassing seven chapters advance this argument. Part I is a case description of each hub, introducing the histories, missions, partnerships, and social structures that organize them. Part II continues an in-depth analysis by presenting the challenges and organizational structure that organize their collaborative work. As developed in conversation with Ronald Heifetz’s account of ‘adaptive work,’ seven primary challenges confront these hubs: relational engagement; leadership development; Boundary Zone work; post-Christendom; financial stability; loneliness and isolation; and connection to place. Further, organizational theory provides interpretive insights to describe these hubs as a novel organizational form within a broader organizational ecology.
Part III is a critical and constructive theological account of adaptive work that draws on field-driven concepts in conversation with Craig Dykstra and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In response to each hub’s stated aim to “reimagine church,” Dykstra’s work directs attention to the diverse “places” (e.g., congregations, higher education institutions, and theological educational institutions) that support adaptive change and how a broader ecclesial ecology serves as a “prism,” refracting leaders’ and communities’ engagement. Further, as explored in conversation with Bonhoeffer’s work, a Christo-ecclesial understanding of communities and organizations provides a basis for the organizational and ecclesial transformation each hub pursues.
Part IV builds a theoretical structure to understand the Christian practical wisdom that sustains conditions for each hub’s adaptive work. Specifically, six modes of leadership offer complementary ways of being with communities, organizations, and neighborhoods: a Caretaker, a Catalyst, a Champion, a Connector-Convener, a Surveyor, and a Guide. The project concludes by drawing out the implications of this analytical and theoretical work for these hubs, for a broader ecclesial ecology, and for the changing landscape of religious life beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Item Open Access Embodied Prayer: the practice of prayer as Christian theology(2016) Kim, SangwooThis dissertation attempts to retrieve the integration of prayer and theology in the life of the church. Prayer is a spiritual and bodily theological activity that forms Christian identity and virtuous character. The bodily dimension of Christian prayer plays an essential role in theological understanding and moral formation. However, the embodiment of prayer has been mostly neglected in modern academic theology. This study highlights the significance of the body at prayer in theological studies and spiritual formation.
Chapter 1 presents Karl Barth’s theology of prayer as a model of the integration of prayer, theology, and Christian life (lex orandi, lex credendi, lex agendi). However, Barth’s attempt to overcome the dichotomy between theory and practice in theology did not pay much attention to embodiment of prayer. Through ritual studies and phenomenology (Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Bourdieu), chapter 2 shows why the bodily dimension of the practice of prayer should be recovered in theology and ministry; then it explains how Christians in the early and medieval church actually prayed with the body, how their bodily actions were understood in their theological paradigms, and how their actions contributed to the formation of Christian character. Chapter 3 narrows the focus to the formation of the heart in the making of Christian character. The practice of prayer has been emphasized not only as an expression of the inner heart of pray-ers but also as a channel of grace that shapes their affections as enduring dispositions of the heart. Furthermore, historically the bodily practice of prayer gave theological authority to the devout Christians who were marginalized in academic theology or ecclesiastical hierarchy, and Chapter 4 presents the lex orandi of praying women who gained their theological knowledge, wisdom, and authority through their exemplary practices of prayer (Catherine of Siena, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Teresa of Avila). These historical examples reveal how Christian communities appreciated and celebrated the theological voices from the margins, which developed from theological embodiments in prayer.
This dissertation concludes that academic theology needs to heed these diverse theological voices, which are nurtured through everyday practice, as an integral part of theological studies. Therefore, it calls for a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between theory and practice in theological education. The integration between theory and bodily practice is necessary for both academic theology and spiritual formation. A more holistic understanding of Christian practices will not only enhance the training of scholars and clergy but also give the laity their own theological voices that will enrich academic theology.
Item Open Access Leaving Home and Finding Home: Theology and Practice of Ann Hasseltine Judson and the American Baptist Mission to Burma, 1812-1826(2015) Rodgers Levens, LauraThis dissertation is a historical and theological investigation of one of the first American missionary women, Ann Hasseltine Judson. This project follows the recent historical shift in international and mission history toward questions of engagement, agency, and exchange to elucidate shifting identities and relational negotiation along the lines of gender, nationality, and community. Ann Judson engaged in a process of detachment and identification, or uprooting and replanting, from her formative context in the United States to her new home in Burma. Ann Judson used devotional habits and theological rationale to uproot herself from the United States and create a critical distance in order to open herself to replant in her new mission field. Her preparations to uproot guided Ann toward the type of mission Burma might offer, and included a shift in her religious tradition from Congregationalist to Baptist. Ann's change to the Baptists widened her circle of supporters, as she added a network of women's societies, congregations, and the newly formed national Baptist Triennial Convention.
Methodological tools of sociological identification, gender history, women's history, and practice theories assist to elucidate Ann's personal agency, organizing principles, and efforts to encourage the agency of others within the American Baptist Mission to Burma. Ann engaged in her context and social relations to construct and shape mission practices. She extended formative knowledge into complex practices of home- and church-making. Ann's organization of practices focused on her two goals: to establish a stable life in Burma and to participate in the birth of the Burmese church. As a foreigner, Ann sought good civic relations and the ability to openly spread Christianity with her practices of household economy and missionary diplomacy. As a missionary, Ann fashioned the practices of catechesis and community cultivation to connect and guide religious inquirers, and enable the agency and responsibility of Burmese converts within the congregation. Her theology of redemption and religious affections tinted every attempt to make sense of her environment, experience, and encounter, and she also crafted a theology of mission for the West in her historical account of the American Baptist Mission to Burma.
Item Open Access Memory on Fire: Re-membering the Lithuanian Body (Politic)(2013) Thorpe, Denise EABSTRACT
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.
Item Open Access Spiritualities of the Displaced: An Ethnographic Study of the Lived Faith of Homeless Persons(2013) Curtis, Cynthia AnnMy 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.
Item Open Access The Lamb Roars: Christ's Apocalyptic Message to Emerging Adults(2019) Lackey, RussellWhat would a conversation between John of Patmos and Jordan of Portland look like? To say it another way, how might Christ’s apocalyptic address to the seven churches of Revelation (Rev 2-3) aid in the faith formation of today’s emerging adults whose worldview has been described as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? This thesis utilizes biblical and practical theology to address three issues facing emerging adults: the replacement of a love ethic with a tolerance narrative that aids market globalization but harms emerging adults; the problem of mass consumerism; and the coddling of young people with the aim of safety over against a life filled with a willingness to suffer for lasting joy. The thesis concludes with a whimsical conversation between John and Jordan that demonstrates what a mentoring relationship might look like between two people in different stages of their faith development.