Abstract
In this collection of articles, talks, sermons, papers, poems and prayers, Nicola Slee brings together materials from her long career in contemporary feminist and practical theology. This book is, as Slee says, rather like a meal composed of meze and tapas: it is a collection to dip in and out of, passing over some, savouring others. It is a delightful celebration of one of the most important feminist theologians of our time.
In offering this series of fragments, Slee offers a similar understanding of theology. A theology of fragments is, she argues, ‘realistic about human frailty and hopeful about human creativity’ (p. 5). In highlighting human brokenness, she also identifies the hope that attends to such a condition: Slee’s God is ‘the consummate recycler’ (p. 6), a phrase she takes from Jan Richardson; a God who can transform and redeem everything, for God wastes nothing.
Constructed from fragments, a theological smorgasbord of sorts, Slee has structured her reflections into six parts.
In Part 1 ‘Fragments for Fractured Times’, Slee considers what, exactly, feminist practical theology brings to the table of theological enquiry. Her focus is on the need to repair the broken web of relationship attested to in Catherine Keller’s hermeneutics of connection, and she highlights the clear sighted nature of feminist reflections on connection. Connection, relationship, are not attributes to be glorified naively. After all, racism, homophobia and sexism distort our relationships to others and our world. The feminist task is to create new and better relationships. The model of attending to brokenness and seeking redemptive healing resonants throughout Slee’s theological practice. This opening section sees her reflecting on her own theological practice, shaped through qualitative research and poetry, as a way of creating ‘theological analysis, critique and envisioning’ (p. 19). Working in this way enables a flourishing and fruitful feminist theology to emerge, as she goes on to illustrate in the subsequent sections.
In Part 2 ‘A Feminist Practical Theology of Liturgy and Prayer’, she offers reflections on poetry and prayer, God-language in prayer, and the role of the body in making and reclaiming liturgical space. That this section opens with a poem entitled ‘How to pray’ exemplifies something of the joy of reading her words. The frequent inclusion of the poetic offers a way into the felt experience of life of faith. That she offers poetry as part of her reflections also suggests something of the limitations of approaches to the divine that are overly concerned with defining God or formularising the sacred. Instead, Slee approaches the divine as experience – be that of presence or absence. The theology that results is practical, grounded in the everyday. Pleasingly, her approach to ritual is not simply about church practice: Slee’s interest is also in the domestic space, and the home as a ‘vital centre of feminist ritual and prayer’ (p. 66). There is a sensual quality to ritual which she links with the feminist affirmative of the body and bodily pleasure: a joy of being brought, in worship, to our senses.
Part 3 ‘A Feminist Practical Spirituality’ includes the article that I enjoyed most. In ‘A Spirituality of Multiple Overwhelmings’, Slee draws upon David Ford’s suggestion that in the common experience of being overwhelmed we find not a problem to be solved, but an experience constitutive of selfhood and, indeed, of faith. Slee offers her own exercise in autoethnography to explore what this means for her own life. In writing that is touching, engaging, and honest, she explores what it means to be caught up in the ‘gratuitous excess of God’ (p. 92) that demolishes binaries and creates ‘a communion that is not threatened by difference’ (p. 93).
In Part 4 ‘A Feminist Practical Theological Poetics’, she shows why the aesthetic and the poetic offer vital ways of addressing the complex and difficult issues faced in a world that is, indeed, subject to fractured times. The article ‘Theological Reflection in Extremis’ reveals this most keenly. It brings together the practical methodology of qualitative research and poetry as the best theological response to human suffering. A member of a women’s group visiting Bosnia in order to remember Srebrenica, she meets survivors of the horrors of that country’s war. The only fitting response to the pain of this conflict is the poems she writes which engage with the horror. There is an openness to her reflections and a willingness to hold what is broken, rather than offer apparent solutions which can never adequately address the pain of such events.
In Part 5 ‘Feminist Theological Practices’, Slee’s attention is drawn to the roles of teaching, reading, writing and research.
In Part 6 ‘A Feminist Practical Theology of the Christa’, Slee’s considerable contribution to this image of the divine is revealed. The papers collected in this section are powerful and engaging, ranging from the Christa as ‘coming girl’ to the Christa as ‘feisty crone’. It is the second image that, as a woman in her 50s who aspires to a flourishing cronedom, I was particularly drawn. The re-reading of the parable of the Judge and the Widow is striking: what if God is the widow and not the judge? How might that challenge our response to the injustice of our world?
This delightful collection bears testimony to Nicola Slee’s remarkable theological imagination. It is a work that will doubtless become a treasured friend, its contents providing a rich sense of the power of feminist practical theology.