Lately at my place we have been having big picture disciplinary conversations as we are re-shaping a shared PhD program in religion between the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver. For many years, we have had a successful concentration in Religion and Psychological Studies with which I have been affiliated. The original framing disciplines into which students would be formed were psychology of religion and pastoral theology. However, we had begun to struggle a bit with the limitations that this title put on students, who often were engaged in the vital study of the intersection of human experience in community and religious traditions, but wanted to work more broadly than the discipline of psychology in the study of religious experience. In their own scholarly formation and research, they are drawing on partners in the worlds of gender and cultural studies, sociology, art history, communications, education, and other fields as well as psychology to understand this intersection.
For me personally, the field of practical theology has been a great place to explore the lived religious lives and formation of human beings, with room for a lot of interdisciplinary exploration. However, because we partner between a department of religious studies and a school of theology, we couldn’t focus the concentration for doctoral students exclusively in terms of theology. Additionally, several of our students are working in traditions other than Christianity, and they found seminars shaped around pastoral theology involved a lot of translation and mental gymnastics to engage Buddhist philosophy or non-sectarian spirituality. This has led me into a spate of reading and exploration into the new-to-me world of the study of lived religion as we are considering that term as one way to name our new sphere of inquiry within the doctoral program.
I find it interesting to think about what it means to approach my scholarly work as lived religion as well as practical theology (and religious education, the actual disciplinary identification of my job title), and to consider which of my research and teaching experiences fit better into which framing discourse and methodological approach. It may seem to some that there are obvious differences between the confessional world of theology and the “detached” or “objective” world of religious studies….but of course there has been a lively debate for a long time within the world of religious studies about the benefits and liabilities of a confessional stance in understanding religious practice in a scholarly way.
One of the really engaging and helpful books exploring this problem in the field of lived religion is Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton University Press, 2006). I’m late to the game on this one, but I have found his exploration of pre-Vatican II American Catholic religious practice and his own reflexive wrestling as a scholar with the role of his religious experience and convictions in his study fascinating. One of the things it has me thinking about is how beginning descriptively and historically with practices he finds troubling and powerful within his own family’s experience, such as the venerated role of the suffering of persons with disabilities and a host of surrounding practices related to this, leads him to frame the tradition in unique theological categories such as “presence” and “relationship” with the divine that have significant purchase in thinking about Christian religious practice and why it matters. Because I sometimes think that the normative categories of systematic Christian theology and historical practices within the tradition overdetermine what we count as significant religious practice in practical theology and how we identify the things we see when we engage in description, I find his work interesting in this respect.
I’m sure others of you are thinking about these intersections as well, particularly if you are in a setting where regular interaction with persons in religious studies departments studying living adherents to religious traditions is part of your daily life. How do you find lived religion and practical theology relate to each other as spheres of inquiry into the study of living persons and their beliefs and practices?