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Who Can ‘Afford’ Practical Theology?
On Opening (and Closing) the Field
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Diego, California
22 November 2014
Tom Beaudoin, Graduate School of Religion, Fordham University
tbeaudoin@fordham.edu
(Due to time limits, text in bold will not be presented)
Having co-authored the chapter on “White Practical
Theology” with Katherine Turpin, I do wonder whether it will
contribute to any change in the white majority of academic
practical theologians, not to mention my own curiosity and
suspicion about my own change and my role in facilitating
change. What is the practice of white scholars reading about
whiteness, especially in academic settings in which whites are
already overvoiced?
I am wagering here that that reading will be more
substantive for practice if it is set in relation to a “spirituality,”
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one that speaks to the white theologian in our agency and
responsibility, our complicity and compassion, in a way that
inspires going deeper.1
I’m talking about the development of a white spirituality
as a traveling companion for a white practical theology. A
white spirituality may evoke a deeper self-examination than
critical work on white practical theology might ‘afford.’ Or at
least they would seem to go together in terms of the fashioning
of white theological selves today. When I question what white
practical theology “affords,” I use the term “affordances” from
music criticism. “Affordances” means what kinds of ‘affective
spaces’ specific music opens up based on the cultural history of
associations in circulation about what the listener is hearing.
The idea is that different kinds of music afford different
affective spaces which are then more or less negotiated
creatively by the listener.2
I think that all significant theological forms afford
affective spaces. My suggestion here is that at this stage of the
Inspired by José M. de Mesa and his use of the concept of “loob” (inner life) in the Philippines as a
site for rethinking theological accounts of wholeness because it corresponds to Filipino(a)s’ agency.
Here, however, white practical theologians are typically inheriting the “advantages” of colonial
theology, rather than its destructions, as is true of the people of the lowland Philippines on behalf
of whom Mesa writes. How this site of action may be a site of “purity” (Mesa’s term) will need
further critical work in a white practical theology. See José de Mesa, Why Theology is Never Far from
Home (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 2003), pp. 132-33.
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See Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, the Sacred, and the Profane (New York:
Oxford), pp. 44-47.
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conversation, relating discussion of white practical theology to
white spirituality might ‘afford’ an affective space that proves
sufficiently evocative and productively troubling so as to open
the critical inquiry further and facilitate change. Consistent
with much research on whiteness, it will be crucial to turn
white practical theologians simultaneously outward and
inward in ways that white theologians are not practiced at
undertaking or allowing to count as experience.
To borrow a formulation from Hans-Dieter Bastian, this
will require an emotional investment in sensing white praxis
on the way to demythologizing it.3 This makes me think that a
white spirituality is not a “way forward” so much as a
resistance within white spiritual experience already. Perhaps
then a white spirituality is already operative in practical
theology, in a more vicious sense, and it is this which has
helped cause the blocks. It is important to see spirituality and
spiritual practices as ambiguous phenomena. I think of
spirituality as a narration of an individual-social experience of
authentically felt responsiveness to a claiming power, that is
one side, but I also think of spirituality as involving all the
harm that its invocation permits. This is why I tried to pursue
in an earlier book how spirituality in the U.S. is violent. If
Bastian in Heitink, Practical Theology: History, Theory, Action Domains, trans. Reinder Bruinsma
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 112.
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spirituality bears this ambiguity irremediably, then the
reworking of the practice-experience of an already-happening,
operative white spirituality would be a practical theological
task, instead of an invention of a new white spirituality. It
would be a matter of converting white spirituality from
dangerous tacitness into a more conscious, yet still dangerous,
incorporation into felt relation for the occluded racedethnicized other.
The respected NPR journalist Michele Norris won a
Peabody Award this year for The Race Card Project, in which
conversations are stimulated by people writing their
“experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, or
observations about race and identity” into one 6-word
sentence.4 One of those “race cards” posted on the Race Card
Project website was from Alex Smailes of Trinidad, whose card
read, “Get ready, the future is brown.”5 When I read this, I
thought of the evocative quotation from philosopher Jozef
Keulartz, “Our world will show itself as the wrong world only
when viewed in the light of the anticipation of the future.”6 I
would imagine or hope that all practical theologians would
admit that the “future is brown”—a phrase deserving of further
www.theracecardproject.com
http://theracecardproject.com/get-ready-future-brown/
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Keulartz in Heitink, Practical Theology, p. 134.
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unpacking—even if our work has not shown that hope.
Working backward from this anticipation of a brown future,
however, we white theologians can see the past in a new light,
as involved in a complex series of racial formations, as a history
of “God” as known in the maintenance of and desire for a racial
outside, and we can experience ourselves as racially situated in
the present, and precisely because of this history, susceptible to
change.
This yes to a brown future, this converting of a tacit white
spirituality into a more consciously avowed one, may borrow
from social science “interpersonal contact theory”7 and
theological works such as Peter Slade’s Open Friendship in a
Closed Society.8 These works suggest how organizations
effectively sponsor the sharing of life stories across racialethnic lines, which are essential for developing a more robust
white practical theology. At the same time, it is not the “job” of
scholars of color to “save” white theologians. White
theologians ourselves need to be encouraged to form raceaware friendships with each other along analogous lines of the
interracial friendships that interpersonal contact theory and
Juliana Schroeder and Jane L. Risen, “Befriending the Enemy: Outgroup Friendship
Longitudinally Predicts Intergroup Attitudes in a Coexistence Program for Israelis and
Palestinians,” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 2014, pp. 1-22 (http://gpi.sagepub.com).
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Peter Slade, Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship (New
York: Oxford, 2009).
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Slade’s theology of friendship argue. In an earlier draft of these
remarks, I was going to suggest that brokers of theological
research sponsor projects of social-academic interaction
between teams or groups of white practical theologians and
practical theologians of color. But now I think at least as
important is social-academic interaction among white practical
theologians around our whiteness. In other words, cultivating
more real knowledge of the other not only across racial-ethnic
lines, but relating within racial lines—that will still feel like
crossing, because these lines have rarely been experienced as
functioning gates.
I have not yet been able to find a developed discussion of
“white spirituality” in the contemporary academic field of
spirituality, and I would be interested to know if and where
that is being carried out explicitly. I have found references to
“white spirituality” as a critical concept in literature from
African American, Native American and aboriginal Australian
contexts—these will probably be helpful and even essential.9
The references to and discussions of “white spirituality” range far and wide across literatures that,
so far as I know, have not been brought together in this way. For example, American studies
scholar Russ Castronovo, in Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth
Century United States writes that “African American writers hinted at how the specific historicity of
black embodiment disappeared under white spirituality” (p. 152). James H. Cone referenced
“white spirituality” in July 1978, in “Sanctification, Liberation and Black Worship,” Theology Today
35:2 (pp. 139-152): “The failure of white Methodism [to follow John Wesley in opposing slavery]
led to the creation of a white spirituality that is culturally determined by American values and thus
indifferent to black people’s struggle for social justice” (p. 149). Elaine Lindsay suggested that
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And in a recent book, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The
Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr, sociologist
Jonathan Rieder suggests that King, in his “Letter from
Birmingham Jail,” and its discussion of the moral failures of
white clergy, sketches an “ethnography of white spirituality”:
“[King] invited himself into the white experience and tried to
fathom what made whites tick. Whites were the opaque ones.
[Whites] were the enigma in need of fathoming.”10 Developing
King’s ethnography into practical theological projects could
prove important.
Recently, Margaret Pfeil has elaborated what read to me as white
spiritual exercises.11 These exercises are proposed in the context of a
book-length argument, co-authored with Alex Mikulich and Laurie
Cassidy, for a “nonviolent spirituality of white resistance” to
hyperincarceration in the USA. In dialogue with Joseph Barndt’s work on
antiracist practice, these white scholars propose the practice of
examination of racialized conscience, wherein one asks questions like
aboriginal spirituality is being used today to “invigorate white spirituality” by male Catholic
theologians (p. 13) in Elaine Lindsay, Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women’s
Fiction (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2000). “White spirituality” is contrasted with “aboriginal spirituality”
(pp. 90ff) in Adam Shoemaker, Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988 (ANU E
Press, 2010). Importantly, see also the works of John Fire Lame Deer, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) and Vine Deloria, God is Red: A Native View of Religion
(Fulcrum, 2003), on Native American views of white religious(ly-informed) practices.
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Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), p. 314.
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Margaret Pfeil, “Contemplative Action: Toward White Nonviolent Resistance to HyperIncarceration,” in Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil, The Scandal of White Complicity
in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 167-185.
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“what made you a ready receptacle to accept white power and privilege?
What made you able to pretend we are all equal and then live comfortably
with the reality that we are not?”12; second, the practice of white caucusing
– where deepening cross-racial relationships require white people first
processing whiteness with each other, parallel to the practice of caucuses
by persons of color, but now where white people, quoting Barndt, “deal
therapeutically with negative socialization and building new antiracist selfimages and identities.” This is “cultivating humility as a spiritual discipline”
for the sake of a (white) conscience accountable to people of color.13 And
there is the spiritual exercise of contemplation, here the white exercise of
contemplation of whiteness as imprisonment, inducing a John-of-theCross-style starless night to facilitate “contemplative identification of the
white person’s soul with that of every other person.”14 (For an account of
such changes of heart-mind, one recent excellent book is by Katherine
Turpin and Anne Carter Walker, Nurturing Different Dreams: Youth Ministry
Across Lines of Difference.15)
Through a white spirituality, white practical theologians may bear
more of the weight of the racial program of practical theology, instead of
displacing it. Bearing this weight raises the matter of field affiliation as it
intersects with racial and ethnic, sex and gender identity. For me, our
Pfeil, “Contemplative Action,” p. 170.
Pfeil, “Contemplative Action,” p. 174.
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Pfeil, “Contemplative Action,” p. 178.
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Katherine Turpin and Anne Carter Walker, Nurturing Different Dreams: Youth Ministry Across Lines of
Difference (Pickwick, 2014).
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book raises the question, What are the costs and benefits of identifying as a
practical theologian anyway, or of identifying any work as practical
theology. Costs and benefits--where and for whom? At what point does
the need to call in allies from other fields to bring in necessary
perspectives mean that the nomenclature of practical theology itself
betokens a damaged field? Relating that damage to future accounts of
practical theology “as such” will be important.
For example, I notice the ways that different authors of the
explicitly racial-/ethnic-identified chapters in the book intersect racialethnic identification with academic theological habitation, or what I will
call “field affiliation” as a shorthand, that are evident in the ways that
“practical theology” advances and withdraws in these chapters. Nancy
Ramsay has observed that “religion” is not often seen as an important
dimension of identity in intersectional research,16 but in these chapters we
see the imperative of invoking practical theology as some kind of
academic-religio-theological stake. For example, Dale Andrews in his
chapter on African-American practical theology includes a great deal of
black theology as sharing in or effectively being practical theology. The
existence of an encompassing definition of practical theology takes on a lot
more than would call itself practical theology, as Andrews understands
there to be an “ongoing practical theological tradition that has grown out
of the unique historical circumstances of black faith communities” as they
Nancy J. Ramsay, “Intersectionality: A Model for Addressing the Complexity of Oppression and
Privilege,” Pastoral Psychology 63 (2014), pp. 453-469, at p. 468.
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survive oppression in the creation of black well-being.17 “Practical
theology” itself is not overtly a problem in this chapter because it describes
the transformational character of black theology; seen differently,
Andrews implicitly makes the whiteness of practical theology into a
problem precisely by constellating practical theology as he does. Courtney
Goto, in her chapter on Asian-American practical theology, characterizes
practical theology as more provincial, as a self-identified research area only
provisionally and very carefully comprehending other Asian-identified
religious/theological discourses. In so doing, she underscores the political
stakes of the very notion of “Asian-American practical theologies,” and the
ambiguity of appeals to practical theology as such. Discussing what she
calls the “thorny questions about what distinguishes Asian American
practical theologies from other Asian American theologies or how one
determines what counts as Asian American,” she opts for “imagining Asian
American practical theologies,” but doing so in a way that “tak[es]
seriously the author’s description of the[ir] work and appreciat[es] the
ways that the[ir] work resonates with and contributes to practical
theology.”18 Here, practical theology seems to be a more parochial
conversation and there are important political-theological reasons to be
cautious about extending the nomenclature to other praxis realms. Like
Goto, Hosffman Ospino, in his chapter on Latino practical theology,
devotes a few pages to wrestling with what it means to identify practical
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Dale Andrews, “African American Practical Theology,” p. 23.
Courtney Goto, “Asian American Practical Theologies,” pp. 34-35.
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theology in relation to other Latino/a theological research. On the one
hand, he argues that Latino/a theologies all share methodological
commitments to practice, experience and context. In this sense, practical
theology is a form of “reflection” widely shared by Latino/a research. This
aspect seems analogous to Andrews’ approach. On the other hand, the
marginalization of Latino/as creates an urgency for multiple disciplinary
discourses to go forward at once (systematics, bible, ethics, etc.) that will
be comprehensible to and effective in the larger academic theological
enterprise, and in this light practical theology understood as a primary
disciplinary home or grounding discourse for practice-intensive Latino/a
theologies is a potential derailment. This has affinities with Goto’s
approach. He opts for arguing that “some Latino/a scholars are creatively
developing important theological projects using methodologies and
discussions that clearly build on practical theological sensibilities and
commitments.”19 The qualifications are important. Practical theology here
seems to be a more general way of proceeding reflectively about praxis.
Similarly, I am mindful of Carmen-Nanko Fernandez’ rejection of
“practical theology,” in her book Theologizing en Espanglish, because it
would further marginalize her Latino/a theology, because of the field’s
“primarily European and Anglo-North American roots” and because
Latino/a theology is already grounded in praxis.20 In the white practical
Hossman Ospino, “U.S. Latino/a Practical Theology,” pp. 234, 235.
Nanko-Fernandez, Theologizing en Espanglish: Context, Community, and Ministry (Maryknoll: Orbis,
2010), pp. 21-22.
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theology chapter that Katherine Turpin and I wrote, we were able to
address only self-identified and more generally recognized practical
theologians because there are so many white ones from which to choose.
There was never a thought for us of whether we were playing with the
limits of the practical theology frame in that sense of needing to reach for
our racial-ethnic allies “outside the field,” so to speak, although for that
very reason we too were sounding the limits of the field, not only its
openings but also its closings. For whiteness research, we had to go to
“outside” to allied scholarship from scholars of color and to white scholars
in other fields to identify the white atmosphere in the self-identified
practical theologies by white authors.
There seems to be a complex practice of invoking practical theology
for various ends here. It is not a matter of pursuing one “field” for various
purposes but of putting into play different assemblages that get called
practical theology, for multiple purposes. What is taken to be the notion
of “practical theology” works and doesn’t work for persons and
communities for a range of reasons that the field as a whole needs to
understand better. Practical theology in the USA has few avowed queer
approaches, there are few humanist or atheist practical theologies, few
that are ‘religious’ beyond Christian. While time does not allow for a
fuller exploration, it seems to me that “intersectional” matters are bound
up in what I am underscoring in these chapters, and probably in the larger
book as a whole, aspects of individual and social identity that include race
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and ethnicity to be sure, but perhaps also gender, sexuality, immigration
status, ability, generational location, academic situation, and religious
affiliation. These parts of ourselves forced on us differentially, shaping
overvoicing and undervoicing practices of visibility and invisibility, are not
easily disentangled, much less clearly distinguishable—and yet these
identity “categories” seem to be articulated in, by, and through who is able
to claim practical theology as a coherent and effective discourse, and through how
practical theology’s coherence and effect is represented.
In that sense, I think there is another deeper project just under the
surface of this book, about how—and for whom—the field opens—and
closes.