Practical Theology, Airplanes, and the International Space Station

How do practical theologians work with the responses that human-made flying vehicles evoke in people? My family rented a small plane for several years when I was a child, and my father (who had been a pilot in the Air Force) would take us flying. Other times, we would go to simply watch airplanes take off and land at the local airport. That’s it. The practice involved sitting near the runway and watching.
Practical theologian Kerstin Soederblom has written about something similar in “A Pilgrimage of a Different Kind,” her chapter in an edited book titled _Lived Religion: Conceptual, Empirical, and Practical-Theological Approaches: Essays in Honor of Hans-Guenther Heimbrock_ (Brill, 2008, pp. 25-38), edited by Heinz Streib, Astrid Dinter, and Kerstin Soederblom. The subtitle of Soederblom’s chaper is illustrative: “The Landing of the First A380 at Frankfurt International Airport Reflected from a Theological Perspective.”
Soederblom reflects on the way in which this “flight event” constitutes a “secular pilgrimage” surprisingly similar to what are often considered “religious pilgrimages.” She argues that gathering to watch the A380 landing is a ritual that is a “liminoide experience” that expresses and consolidates something potentially deep for those who undergo it. Such experiences have ‘existential’ valence, building ‘significant memories which might have an identity-building character, and might open the view to oneself or to life in general or to the world.” More specifically, this ritual evokes “overcom[ing] daily routines [and] human limitations [so as] to be able to fly.” It “put[s] the personal little home base into a perspective of a global scale with its interdependencies, interrelatedness, and interconnectedness. These are important theological topics.” They lead practical theologians to “a necessary openness and respect for a pilgrimage of a different kind.” (pp. 37-38)
She also does not ignore the limitations of, and some negative environmental consequences of, air flight. But she argues that the expansive experience of pilgrimages to the A380 (and by extension, to other spaces of flight) is a theologically resonant and significant experience, pointing to the value of “secular pilgrimage” today.
I thought of my childhood experiences with airplanes, and Soederblom’s practical theology, when I recently saw this video about the International Space Station. (Don’t miss the special viewing area with a window onto planet Earth!)
This remarkable video tour of the ISS made me wonder anew about everyday practices of following NASA news, pictures from the Hubble telescope, reports about space research (again in the news today about evidence for the collision of black holes), or engaging reports/video of the International Space Station.
Soederblom’s chapter does not specify very much what these experiences might mean for figuring God, religion, or other predications of ultimate reality, but for practical theology that question is never far away. One thing I wondered after watching the ISS tour was whether religions might or should become more like the International Space Station: polycultural, multilingual collaborations on the “view from above” (a phrase from Pierre Hadot) that relativize all petty and dangerous differences “below” and thus serve not only the human cause but humanity understood amidst a larger animal, planetary, and cosmic field of life.
Tom Beaudoin, Fordham University