Abstract
Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction
Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski, eds.
Baltimore, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 342 pp. $34.00
Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction advances the long-standing concerns of co-editors Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski to articulate practical theology’s robust and rightful place in academy, church, and public perception, as their individual chapters in this volume affirm. Both work to incorporate practical theology more explicitly in theological education curricula. For example, Cahalan, Roman Catholic practical theologian at St. John’s School of Theology, is author of Introducing the Practice of Ministry (Liturgical Press, 2010). Mikoski, Neo-Protestant practical theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, supported the recent Straining at the Oars: Case Studies in Pastoral Leadership by H. Dana Fearon III (Eerdmans, 2013). Both have served the field of practical theology well as past presidents of the Association of Practical Theology, and both contributed to significant edited volumes, For Life Abundant (Eerdmans, 2008) and The Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Wary of any single definition of practical theology, most practical theologians instead embrace multiple registers of critical engagement—including ethnographies of practices, phenomenologies of practices, constructive theologies of practices, complex methodological reflections, and more. So it is fitting that Opening the Field offers 15 different openings into practical theology as a diverse landscape held together by common values and commitments to weave histories, contexts, human experiences, theological engagement, theories and practices, and interdisciplinary conversations. The editors show how these openings traverse methodological, ecclesiological, gender, or ethnic identities, and other possible organizational paradigms, even as chapters unfold in the volume in alphabetical order: African American (Dale P. Andrews), Asian American (Courtney T. Goto), Contextual (Steven Bevans, S.V.D.), Empirical (Richard Osmer), Evangelical (Andrew Root), Feminist and Womanist (Joyce Ann Mercer), Protestant Hermeneutics (Sally A. Brown), Roman Catholic Hermeneutics (Claire E. Wolfteich), Liberationist (Katherine Turpin), Neo-Protestant (Mikowski), Postmodern (Tom Beaudoin), Religious Practices (Don C. Richter), Roman Catholic (Cahalan), US Latino/a (Hosffman Ospino), and White (Beaudoin and Turpin) Practical Theologies. While I wish there were additional stand-alone chapters on womanist, intercultural, and postcolonial perspectives, the volume’s diversity remains impressive. Co-editors describe collaborative conversations, inspired by Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra, among contributors that yielded a common chapter structure emerging from an agreed-upon “irreducible plurality” (7). Each chapter thus includes the following template (which numerous endorsements highlight as a most helpful contribution): historical context, key figures, authoritative norms and sources, theory–practice relationship, contextual engagement, interdisciplinary partners, areas of current and future engagement, and suggested readings. Most chapters also include compelling personal narratives in a pre-template introduction.
Opening the Field offers practical theology students and teachers abundant access points into studying, teaching, and engaging diverse practices. This book will be required in doctoral studies in practical theology, will support life-long reflection on ministerial practices and vocational development, and will empower collaboration among diverse practical theologians. Rather than two different practical theologies as assumed, if implicitly, in much practical theology literature, Catholic and Protestant pastoral theologies enter into conversation in this text with internal variation and multiple avenues of comparison and conversation. The volume also brings together a range of perspectives often seen as divergent on more conservative or progressive lines. Furthermore, practical theology needs more interdisciplinary engagement with historians such as one finds in the essay by David D. Daniels III and Ted A. Smith, “History, Practice, and Theological Education” (in For Life Abundant, Eerdmans, 2008, 214–40). Hence, the volume makes an enormous contribution by weaving contemporary practices with historical texts and tensions, including Protestant Reformations, Vatican II, US Civil Rights movements, Latin American liberation theology, various histories of seminaries and philosophical movements within academia, and the field’s own historical development. Opening the Field ties present concerns and historical tensions with creative and imaginative future trajectories, such as continued focus on naming and eradicating oppressions; negotiating multiple cultural and religious identities (within and well beyond practical theology); weighing clear normative claims with necessary hermeneutical risks; translating practical theology between church and academy, which can work to heal an all too often divisive relationship; and interdisciplinarity across theological education from Bible to spirituality to support a variety of religious practices.
While nearly every chapter names the importance of engaging the kinds of diversities apparent across the volume, few chapters engage each other within the volume beyond what is evident in the endnotes. Of note, readers learn that the alphabetically last chapter on white practical theology was in fact an afterthought to the table of contents. Here Turpin and Beaudoin outline how the drive toward systematizing practical theology has fueled and can continue to fuel resistance to self-reflexivity required to engage “whatever keeps whiteness invisible and yet ultimately authoritative” (266). Without this chapter as a significant step toward a self-reflexivity demanded across any and every opening, fears articulated by Andrews, Goto, and Ospino of undue burden on underrepresented practical theologians would be even more founded. The volume thus provides a deep opening into reflecting on intersectional dynamics at stake in life-giving and death-dealing religious practices today.
Opening the Field invites readers to enter practical theology’s convergences (named in the conclusion as valuing self-reflection, context, and interdisciplinarity) and divergences (named in the conclusion as differing interpretations of human experiences, historical contexts, and normative sources). The editors also encourage readers to play with the order of the chapters, underlying commitments, organization provided by the common template, and additional convergences and divergences. However, I wonder if an additional self-reflexive section in the template inviting contributors to assess the limits of play and politics of power around the use of a common template would have deepened this invitation to creative engagement. Still, the volume affirms practical theology’s robust role in formative theological study, carrying on a long-standing conversation among scholars that is itself open to new voices and perspectives. Opening the Field provides an invaluable contribution to a field of study that has opened multiple significant future trajectories.
Melinda A. McGarrah Sharp
Phillips Theological Seminary, Tulsa, Oklahoma