Review Gift of Difference

I've just finished the book review of The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation edited by Chris Huebner and Tripp York (foreword by John Milbank) that I was invited to do for the journal Political Theology. I'm really glad that Luke Bretherton asked me to review this book as my post-doctoral work is moving more and more in the direction of political theology and it'll be great to start getting my name associated with this discipline. I'm not sure when it'll be published, but I'll post as soon as I do.

Springfield, Springfield!

It's a hell of a town, the schoolyard's up and the shopping mall's down!

I'm off to Springfield (Missouri) tomorrow where I'll be presenting at Drury University's "Subverting the Norm: The Emerging Church, Postmodernism and the Future of Christianity." Their website has an impressive-sounding blurb for me, so hopefully delegates won't be disappointed. I'll be speaking on, "An Emerging A/Theistic Fighting Collective? A Caputian Introduction to Zizek's Pneumatology." Now that it's (almost) edited down to 6,000 words, it's a little more theory-laden then I had anticipated, but I'll be introducing Zizek's pneumatology, his deployment of the term "Holy Spirit" as a community of truth-subjects, a "fighting collective," and staging a conversation between Zizek and Caputo on atheism and theism, metaphysics and materialism. But it will cover:

• Zizek, Caputo, Badiou, Milbank, Lacan (argh!), Saint Paul, and a bit of Hegel and Kant - oh, and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Augustine and Barth;
• the big Other, the vanishing mediator, the formulae of sexuation, constitutive exception, and non-all;
• contingency and necessity;
• the truth-event, the truth-subject, and truth-procedure(s);
• universalism;
• hermeneutics, narrativity, metanarrativity and meta-metanarrativity;
• determination, indeterminacy, and relative determinacy;
• atheism, theism, and a/theism;
• materialist materialism, theological materialism and true materialism;
• call, cause and responsibility;
• crucifixion and resurrection;
• the death of God and the death of the death of God;
• spectral materialism and spectral messianism; and
• incarnation and carnality.

So far, the schedule is as follows:

FRIDAY, OCT. 15: RADICAL THEOLOGY IN EMERGING CHRISTIANITY

9 am: Registration

10 am: "Beating God to Death: Radical Theology & the New Atheism," Roundtable conversation with Jeffrey Robbins, Christopher Rodkey and professors from Drury University's department of philosophy and religion

11 am: "An Emerging Radical Theology: On Politics and Ecclesiology," Jeffrey Robbins and Christopher Rodkey

12 pm: Lunch (on your own)

1 pm: "The Emerging Church 101: An introduction for those new to the conversation," Gary Black

2 pm: "To Believe Is Human, to Doubt Divine: Introducing Zizek’s Christology," Peter Rollins

3 pm: "An Emerging A/Theistic Fighting Collective? A Caputian Introduction to Žižek’s Pneumatology," Katharine Moody

4 pm: "Just Us: The undeconstructible Christ community in the age that is passing away," Carl Raschke

7 pm: Keynote presentation I: "Radical Theology—or What’s the Emerging in Emergent?" John Caputo

8:15 pm: Keynote presentation II, Peter Rollins

9:15 – 10 pm: After Session Conversation with John Caputo, Peter Rollins, Carl Raschke, Katharine Moody, Jeffrey Robbins & Christopher Rodkey

10:30 pm: Revival! Transformance Art with Peter Rollins and VOID, a collective from Waco, Texas, at the Creamery Arts Center in Downtown Springfield

SATURDAY, OCT. 16: EMERGING CHRISTIANITY AND THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH

8 am: Coffee & Bagels

8:30 am: Keynote Presentation III, Karen Ward

10 am: Church practitioners workshop, Peter Rollins & John Caputo

11:30 am: Lunch, on your own unless you registered for the Saturday lunch option (see registration packet for local options)

1 pm: Keynote presentation IV, Karen Ward

2:15 – 3:15 pm & 3:30 – 4:30 pm: Breakout Sessions for Church Practitioners

2:15 – 3:15:
Emily Bowen: "Megachurch or Megasubversion? Transformative Ritual in the Emerging Church"
Chris Rodkey: "Satanism in the Suburbs: Ordination as Insubordination"
Julie Kennedy: "The Open Invitation: Tearing Down Labels at the Door"
Phil Snider: "Preaching After the Death of God: With A Little Help From Derrida & Caputo"

3:30 – 4:30:
Laura Fregin: "Art and Justice in Emergent Communities"
David Weiss: "Putting the ‘Queer’ back in Christianity: How extending a full welcome to LGBT persons reclaims the work of Jesus for today"
Lindsey Arnold: "Messiahs, Monsters & Others: The Search for Christ Figures in the TV Show Lost"
Travis Cooper: "Postmodernism, Pentecostalism & the Emergent Church: The Persistence of Azusa-Oriented Praxis"
Matt Gallion, Chris Rodkey & Phil Snider: "Why We're Not Emergent: By Three Guys Who Used to Be"

7 pm: [D]mergent meet-up, Venue TBA

Making an Emergent Future Present

My review of Bruce Sanguin's The Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal, entitled "Making an Emergent Future Present," is now available from The Expository Times (vol.122, no.1, p.48, [Oct 2010]) here.

Emerging Church Article

My Expository Times article, "'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu" gets a mention over at The Immanent Frame, a communal interdisciplinary blog that posts about secularism, religion and the public sphere.

"I Hate Your Church..." Published

My Expository Times article on the emerging church ("'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu") is now available online. You can access the abstract for free here, but you'll have to subscribe to The Expository Times, purchase short-term access, or log-in using an Athens account or university homepage.

I'm not allowed to distribute the article either.


The article briefly assesses current ways of defining "the emerging church" and suggests the value of the notion of a "milieu." Borrowing from Gordon Lynch's work on progressive spirituality, the concept of a global "emerging church milieu" (with regional milieus within it, e.g. "US emerging church milieu" or "UK emerging church milieu" etc) allows the emerging church to be portrayed as a coherent religious phenomenon without ignoring local differences and divergences.


I then enumerate what I see as the six commitments of emerging church discourse. These are commitments to:

1. "glocal" contextualisation,
2. "ancient-future" traditions,
3. organisational experimentation,
4. exploring postmodern thought,
5. (re)thinking theology, and
6. socially, politically and environmentally just living.

Not having much space in which to present these commitments in this article, I go into much more detail in my doctoral thesis, but these commitments (which obviously overlap with other Christian and non-Christian milieus beyond the emerging church milieu) are variously understood and put into practice multifariously.


Then I identify two spiritualities which emerge from this milieu: Deep Church spirituality and A/Theistic spirituality. These two spiritualities were primarily presented as hermeneutics in my thesis, but they can also be thought of as spiritualities. In my postdoctoral research, I hope to explore them as social imaginaries. Again, I didn't have the room to go into much detail in this article, but I hope to publish a few academic journal articles and a monograph that will bring my library basement destined thesis to the masses!

My Expository Times article then concludes by reflecting upon the missional orientation of these two emerging church spiritualities. Following a question that John Hull asked of fresh expressions of church in Mission-Shaped Church and Mission-Shaped Questions, I wonder whether Deep Church and A/Theistic spiritualities are kingdom-shaped or church-shaped in their missiologies.

An "Emerging Church" Book Review

After completing my article for The Expository Times, "'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu," I was asked to write a book review of Bruce Sanguin's (2008) The Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal. My review, entitled "Making an Emergent Future Present," will appear in about six months.

This is not really a book written about or for what I consider to be the "emerging church" - and the reviews from within what I call the "emerging church milieu" agree (here's one by Jonathon Brink on Emergent Village). This is about progressive Christianity (see Gordon Lynch's great overview and analysis of the broader "progressive milieu"), or, as Sanguin's website describes it, "evolutionary Christian spirituality." It is a book about progressive Christianity and modern science, rather than about emerging Christianity and postmodern thought or theology. The science he appropriates in this book (spiral dynamics) will be deeply troubling to many within the emerging church milieu. However, his work is nonetheless theologically and politically interesting.

Expository Times article on the Emerging Church

Way back during the last few months of 2009, I was asked to write a piece for The Expository Times on religion and the Internet for a volume they are producing on the future of Christianity. I was pleased about being asked but felt a little bit that it would be revisiting tangential interests rather than moving me forward, so when the person they had lined up to write a piece on the emerging church was unable to, I was really pleased to write that instead! It will feature in vol.121, no.10 (July) and is entitled, " 'I Hate Your Church, What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu." It's basically an overview of what I describe as the emerging church "milieu" and the two spiritualities (they are characterised as two hermeneutics in my thesis) that I see arising from such a milieu. The basic argument of the piece (relating to where the missional focus of the emerging church should be located - church or kingdom) should, however, ignite a few sparks.

Young Theologians publication

Just a quick post to say that some of the proceedings from the "Interface: Being a Young Theologian in the World" conference (see my blog posts here, here, here, here, and here) are going to be published. We've been asked to submit our papers for consideration, so fingers crossed for another book chapter. It was a great conference and from my perspective many of the papers linked really neatly, particularly in relation to asking important questions about who we are and where we're going as young theologians. My paper was about not knowing who we are and whether we are theologians, so everything sparked off a lot of interesting thoughts. So we'll see what happens with that.

Review of Reading Spiritualities

The current issue (vol.23,no.3,Sept09) of Literature & Theology includes a review of the collection of papers edited by my supervisor, Deborah Sawyer, and fellow PhD candidate, Dawn Llewellyn, Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred.

Anna Fisk (University of Glasgow) writes that the editors' introduction is 'an excellent stand-alone map of where postmodern theological interpretation is situated today' (p.368).

She ends by commenting that,

'In her introduction to Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? Deborah Sawyer identifies feminist theology's tendency to work in a ghetto, separate from secular feminism and other branches of theology. Reading Spiritualities is a valuable example of resistance to that trend, asserting the continued relevance of doing theology with a political edge, yet without staying boxed in a room of one's own' (p.370).

But, more importantly, here's the bit about me:

'Katharine Sarah Moody examines the blogs of the 'emerging church' movement as an example of the wish to move from being 'passive consumers' to 'active creators' amongst Christians influenced by postmodernity. One major insight of Moody's study is that the censorship of readers' comments, and the hierarchy of credibility that exists amongst blogs and bloggers, may herald the return of textual 'authority over' in a new guise' (p.369).

Joking aside, Dawn did an especially great job not only being the primary organiser of the international conference from which these papers stemmed, but also putting together the collection and doing such a stirling editing job! Yay for Dawn!!!

Queerying Sociology of Religion Article

Further to the saga of publishing my "Queerying The Spiritual Revolution: Religious Mediation Among LGBT Christians" (see here, here, here and here), I've finally decided to go for it and submit it (once I've played around with the house publishing style) to the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Paul Heelas was very generous, as usual, in his advice and has given me the confidence to give it a go! So, watch this space...

Refuting the Allergy to Determinacy

My paper at the "Towards a Philosophy of Life" conference, "Making Good on the "Good" of Life: Emerging Logics and Poetics of the Kingdom" (see here for my abstract) was well received. A few people who hadn't been there had heard from others who were that it was good, which was really nice to hear. Jack Caputo called it 'sizzling,' but I don't really know what that means! He said he completely agreed with my analysis of James K.A. Smith's work, particularly the logic of incarnation (see blog post here about Jack's paper, "Bodies Without Flesh: The Soft Gnosticism of Incarnational Theology"), and said again that I read him very well (he had positive things to say about my Boston paper too, see here for an overview of what I said). But I guess it's easy to get those kinds of reactions when the person whose work you are reflecting on is a lovely guy and when you're saving favourable things! I'd love to get Jamie Smith's take on what I'm doing. Maybe I could email him? He's working on a trilogy (first part to be published this September, entitled Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation) on a theology of culture, but I'm particularly intrigued by his methodological work arguing for the importance of liturgical practices as the site for philosophical reflection on religion.

Anyway, this paper forms parts of my doctoral thesis, particularly chapter Six, "Truth and Fictionality." But, as slightly tangential to my main argument, it is something that could easily be turned into a journal article with some more padding out and the like. As you can see from the paper's abstract (here), my main concern is to refute the criticisms Jamie Smith levels at Jack Caputo's Derridean deconstructive theology. Jamie's criticisms can be found most accessibly in his "The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism" in Neal DeRoo and Brian Lightbody's The Logic of Incarnation: James K.A. Smith's Critique of Postmodern Religion, pp.3-37. Smith identifies in both Caputo and Derrida what he terms a 'logic of determination.' (See here for more details on all this). My paper argues that the operative logic at work in Caputo's theology is that of the call or the promise which, far from being allergic to particularity, as Smith contends, seeks to release the promise in particular determinate religious (and "non-religious") traditions.

My argument runs basically thus:

• A presentation of Smith's characterization of the 'logic of determination.'

For Smith, the Derridean/Caputian logic of determination results in an interpretation of particularity that assumes, first, the finite nature of human life to be structurally (that is, necessarily) regrettable and, second, the interpretive visions of life and hopes for life of humanity’s determinate religious traditions to be exclusionary, violent and unjust. Thirdly, for Smith, the consequences of such a logic include the translation of Derrida’s undeconstructible justice into an indeterminate, not specifically Christian, kingdom of God that is similarly structurally always to-come, never present.

• A defense of Caputo's theological project against these criticisms (in an alternative order).

Firstly, Caputo’s reflections on the name of God are associated with several particular determinate traditions, including the creation narratives and the kingdom parables of the Christian scriptures. Secondly, an exploration of these creation and kingdom themes reveals that finitude is affirmed as part of the "goodness" of creation, no matter what, by God's "good," his "yes," at the moment of creation, and that the kingdom of God is our second "yes," our affirmation of the task of "making good" on the goodness of creation, no matter what. Thirdly, then, a (mis)interpretation of the kingdom of God as a concept that corresponds to a literal reality that will either arrive (Smith) or never arrive (Smith's reading of Caputo) (mis)characterizes it as a concept that aims to be representational rather than as a concept that aims to be transformational.

• An argument that Caputo's theology is preferable to Smith's.
  

In reflecting phenomenologically on the general structure of religious experience, both Caputo and Smith emphasise the undecidability of life, the contingency of our interpretations of it, and the fictive nature of all hermeneutics. However, Caputo more successfully retains these phenomenologcal insights in his particular, determinate Christian theology than Smith.

You can view my powerpoint presentation below, and email me if you'd like a copy of the paper I gave; but I'm thinking seriously about turning it into a journal article. Over the next year (once I've finally submitted my thesis) I will be attempting to get a publishing contract to turn it into a book, but this little nugget of the argument could easily be slotted out and published in article form. At the moment, I'd entitle it: "Refuting the Allergy to Determinacy: Determining the Theo-Logic of the Call in Weak Theology."

Making Good on the "Good" of Life: Emerging Logics and Poetics of the Kingdom

View more documents from Katharine Moody.

Philosophy of Life Conference Round-Up

I got back last night from Liverpool Hope's "Towards a Philosophy of Life: Reflections on the Concept of Life in Continental Philosophy of Religion" conference, having had a thoroughly enjoyable (if not totally follow-able) weekend. My own learning style is not comfortable with listening to people read written papers. I'm much more at home with people presenting, rather than reading, work. But philosophers tend to go for the practice of writing a journal paper or book chapter or whatever, and then just reading it out - rather than thinking about their audience's learning styles and altering the piece in order to facilitate rather than alienate others! Only very few of the papers this weekend were easy to follow (even if you knew the material they were talking about) which was disappointing. But I have always felt that sociologists of religion are much better presenters, thereby actually helping their audience follow their argument. Didn't mean to start this post off with a bit of a moan, but philosophers' styles of presentation do tend to detract from the enjoyment of philosophy conferences.

I met a cool bunch of people, including Simon Scott (PhD student at Warwick), Shahida Bari (How To Live blog), Aaron Landau (University of Hong Kong), Todd Mei (University of Kent) and Chad Lackies (Concordia Seminary, here's his blog). It was particularly great to meet Colby Dickinson (KU Leuven) whose paper on Agamben, the messianic and canonicity was really stimulating because of a resonance with my own work. Canonicity, Colby writes, is "the 'desire' for the canonical over and beyond any canon," clearly mirroring the hope against hope for the messianic given voice in but not restricted to determinate concrete messianisms. My paper also charted this dual movement, but in relation to Jack Caputo's historical association with Christianity (I was looking particularly at creation and kingdom in order to refute Jamie Smith's characterization of Caputo's work as allergic to determinate particularities, more of which in a later post) and messianic disassociation. Colby made some intriguing connections with identity formation, and Jack, Colby and I had a useful discussion after his paper about how communities that adopt deconstructive theologies actually do (ir)religious community. It's what I'm hoping to work on next, getting together a proposal for a research fellowship after I've finished my thesis.

Anyway, Jack's paper on "Bodies Without Flesh: The Soft Gnosticism of Incarnational Theology" was very thought provoking, though I know there were a lot of people that were very disppointed that John Milbank only came for his own paper, rather than engaging with Caputo's criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy's incarnational theology. His excuse was that he had, apparently, been stuck on one of the amphibious vehicles (duck) that take you on tours round Liverpool and brokedown (lame). Well, Jack's paper draws from his work towards a sequel to The Weakness of God, currently entitled The Weakness of Flesh. He argued that incarnational theology's incarnation is not radical enough. It is a theology of in-carnation, rather than a theology of carnality. It places "the life of flesh within an economy of bodies without flesh." Like contemporary robotologists, incarnational theology attempts to transform bodies of flesh into bodies without flesh, in the process "betraying" flesh, harbouring a secret "horror of flesh." Instead, he asked, "What would a theology of carnality itself, before or without In-carnation, look like?" "Instead of a transaction between fleshly and fleshless being, I propose a more radical conception of incarnation as an event of flesh itself, of becoming-flesh," of taking, therefore, Christianity seriously, at its word, as the Word made flesh. Caputo is, as I intimated above, not removing himself from the Christian tradition but trying to make the tradition "make good" on its promises. Looking forward to The Weakness of Flesh already!

Back from Paris

So Sim and I got back from Paris, after a very hot few days wandering around looking at pretty things. We loved the Louvre and Musee Rodin, and watched the sunset from the Eiffel Tower. But my French is incredibly rusty and what I've picked back up from reading deconstructive theology isn't exactly helpful. Only the first half of Je ne sais pas, il faut croire is actually useful!!!


I heard back from Sexualities, to whom I had submitted my "Queerying The Spiritual Revolution: Religious Mediation among LGBT Christians" article (see here), and the editor and reviewers asked me to revise a few things. As I'm madly trying to complete my thesis, however, I'm quite uncertain as to whether or not to spend time on it and resubmit it. The revisions they asked for really would transform the piece into something much more socially scientific, with methodology sections and tonnes of data, whereas the piece is more theoretical than that, dealing with broader implications rather than the specifics of my study. My supervisor suggested Theology and Sexuality, but I'm not sure that's quite right either, possibly still too specialist. There are important implications to draw from this piece beyond the boundaries of sexuality studies. I was thinking of aiming high and going for the Journal of Contemporary Religion, which is a broader journal in which more people will be engaged in the mapping of the contemporary religious and spiritual landscape that will bring them in contact with Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead's The Spiritual Revolution in the first place. This means they might be more my audience, than a sexualities journal. JCR deals with

• "classical topics in the study of religion, such as secularisation and the vitality of religion or traditional sectarian movements;
• "more recent developments in the study of religion, including religion and social problems, religion and the environment, religion and education, the transmission of religion, the materialisation and visualisation of religion in various forms, new forms of religious pluralism, the rise of new forms of religion and spirituality, religion and the Internet, religion and science, religion and globalisation, religion and the economy, etc.
• "theoretical approaches to the study of religion;
• "discussions of method in relation to empirical research;
• "qualitative and quantitative research and related issues."

My article seems to fit well here. Here's the abstract (again):

This article uses small-scale studies among LGBT Christians to “queery” the dualistic framework of Heelas and Woodhead’s The Spiritual Revolution. Theories of mediation are required to explain the practices and beliefs of those negotiating both subjective-life and life-as modes of living. Identity integration strategies among LGBT Christians suggest ways in which individuals and communities might navigate these categories of religious significance and authority. Data confirms that different forms of life-as religions-cum-spiritualities are making the subjective turn; that participants nevertheless alternate between rather than ‘fuse’ internal and (albeit reconstructed) external authorities; and that Heelas’ more recent God without/“god” within distinction is a clearer marker of whether practitioners are already affiliated to either transcendent theism or inner-life spirituality and of when a transition from one to the other has been or is being undertaken.

Key words:

• Christianity;
• Heelas and Woodhead;
• LGBT;
• inner-life spirituality;
• spiritual revolution.

Annual Panel Reviews

So, it's that time of year again.

"Researching Theo(b)logy" Published

My copy of Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age came in the post this morning! Look out for Ellen Moore's really interesting chapter on American evangelical churches' responses to The Da Vinci Code. My chapter is called, "Researching Theo(b)logy: A Participatory Research Methodology for the Blogosphere."



I write about the use the emerging church milieu make of two Internet-based technological innovations (blogs and wikis). After documenting the difficulties in using these texts (see my chapter in Reading Spiritualities in relation to the nature of online text) as sources of data, I suggest the benefits for researchers of having a research-specific blog (particularly for researchers looking at the Internet) and reflect on the practical and ethical issues involved in such a participatory methodology.

By chance, there's an interesting article in this quarter's Network (the newsletter of the British Sociological Association) on "Blogology," by Rebecca Leach (Keele University). She writes, 'The blog is hugely underused by sociologists as a means of communication... This is a real shame because blogs can give the public a real flavour of our research and writing much quicker than any other published output... A rich stream of new and interesting thinking can be found in the blogs of the many PhD students who creatively link together their academic ideas with their personal, political and cultural lives' (p.18). Rebecca's article includes links to A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book, Global Sociologist and a Very Public Sociologist - all with cooler names than my blog. Hey ho.

Maybe Fieldwork in Religion (see post here) would be a good place to further reflect on how my research blog is going? Obviously, the posts here at OpenSourceResearch form a cumulative reflection on this methodology but (as I originally wrote the chapter that appears in Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age in April 2007 - with some revisions over the year) it is now much more common for academics (particularly PhD students) to have research-related blogs. It would be interesting to explore if and how these blogs have encouraged participation from their research subjects.

Religious Mediation among LGBT Christians

After blogging twice (here, and here) about trying to write up my MA research into an article, and in response to the call for papers from late last year, I've finally submitted my entry to the journal Sexualities' special edition on religion and spirituality. It's entitled "Queerying The Spiritual Revolution: Religious Mediation among LGBT Christians." It has morphed significantly both from my MA dissertation (now also including data from my other MA studies, including a congregational study of the spirituality of an MCC in the North of England, and an exploration of LGB identity as portrayed in the LGCM archives) and from my previous attempts to get the 25,000 words down to under 6,000! It's become much less about LGBT Christians and much more about how sociologists of religion and spirituality approach their phenomena, particularly how the methodological categories used by Heelas and Woodhead in their (2005) The Spiritual Revolution are problematized in my small scale studies. This might mean that it isn't "sexual" enough for Sexualities, but we'll see. If it doesn't get accepted, at least I've (finally) got it to say what I want it to say and to do it in under 6,000 words.

Here's the final version of the abstract:

This article uses small-scale studies among LGBT Christians to “queery” the dualistic framework of Heelas and Woodhead’s The Spiritual Revolution. Theories of mediation are required to explain the practices and beliefs of those negotiating both subjective-life and life-as modes of living. Identity integration strategies among LGBT Christians suggest ways in which individuals and communities might navigate these categories of religious significance and authority. Data confirms that different forms of life-as religions-cum-spiritualities are making the subjective turn; that participants nevertheless alternate between rather than ‘fuse’ internal and (albeit reconstructed) external authorities; and that Heelas’ more recent God without/“god” within distinction is a clearer marker of whether practitioners are already affiliated to either transcendent theism or inner-life spirituality and of when a transition from one to the other has been or is being undertaken.

Key words:

• Christianity;
• Heelas and Woodhead;
• LGBT;
• inner-life spirituality;
• spiritual revolution.

Researching Theo(b)logy

Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age is now available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk. It will be published at the end of February 2009, and contains chapters on a range of case studies from interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks. Edited by Dr. Chris Deacy (University of Kent) and Dr. Elizabeth Arweck (University of Warwick), it collects essays that were presented at the 2007 conference on Religion, Media and Culture. My contribution is methodological, mainly due to the point at which I was at with my thesis, reflecting on the use the global emerging church milieu make of blogs and wikis and suggesting a participatory research methodology for research into the blogosphere. Here's the blurb from Amazon.co.uk:

"In recent years, there has been growing awareness across a range of academic disciplines of the value of exploring issues of religion and the sacred in relation to cultures of everyday life. Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age offers inter-disciplinary perspectives drawing from theology, religious studies, media studies, cultural studies, film studies, sociology and anthropology. Combining theoretical frameworks for the analysis of religion, media and popular culture, with focused international case studies of particular texts, practices, communities and audiences, the authors examine topics such as media rituals, marketing strategies, empirical investigations of audience testimony, and the influence of religion on music, reality television and the internet. Both academically rigorous and of interest to a wider readership, this book offers a wide range of fascinating explorations at the cutting edge of many contemporary debates in sociology, religion and media, including chapters on the way evangelical groups in America have made use of The Da Vinci Code and on the influences of religion on British club culture and electronic dance music."

Reading Spiritualities Published

Stemming from a Lancaster University conference a couple of years back, my supervisor Dr. Deborah F. Sawyer and fellow PhD student Dawn Llewellyn have collected several papers together to form a publication entitled Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred.


Here's some blurb: "The phenomenon of 'sacred text' has undergone radical deconstruction in recent times, reflecting how religion has broken out of its traditional definitions and practices, and how current literary theories have influenced texts inside the religious domain and beyond. "Reading Spiritualities" presents both commentary and vivid examples of this evolution, engaging with a variety of reading practices that work with traditional texts and those that extend the notion of 'text' itself. The contributors... open up understandings of where and how 'sacred texts' are emerging and being reassessed within contemporary religious and spiritual contexts; and make room for readings where the spiritual resides not only in the textual, but in other unexpected places... [The book] offers a unique and well-focussed 'snapshot' of the textual constructions and representations of the sacred within the contemporary religious climate - accessible to the general reader, as well as more specialist interests of students and researchers working in the crossover fields of religious, theological, cultural and literary studies."


And the table of contents:

• "Introduction," Deborah F. Sawyer and Dawn Llewellyn
• "Getting a/cross god: An Interview with Michèle Roberts," Michèle Roberts, Dawn Llewellyn and Deborah F. Sawyer
• "The Sacred in Caribbean Literature: A Theological Conversation," Michael N. Jagessar
• "Dramatic Improvisation: A Jazz Inspired Approach to Undertaking Theology with the Marginalized," Anthony G. Reddie
• "‘Gendering the Spirit’: Reading Women’s Spiritualities with a Comparative Mirror," Ursula King
• "Our Sacred Texts: Literature, Theology and Feminism," Heather Walton
• "The Desire for Interactivity and the Emerging Texts of the Blogosphere," Katharine Sarah Moody
• "Spiritual Themes and Identities in Chicana Texts: The Virgin of Guadalupe as a Role Model for Womanhood," María Antonia Álvarez
• "Bihishti Zewar: A Text for Respectable Women?" Raana Bokhari
• "Forming Community in the Third Wave: Literary Texts and Women’s Spiritualities," Dawn Llewellyn
• "Solomon’s Narrative: Architecture, Text and the Sacred," Ozayr Saloojee
• "Reading Texts, Watching Texts: Mythopoesis on Neopagan Websites," Maria Beatrice Bittarello
• "Word and Image: Burgess, Zeffirelli, and Jesus the Man of Nazareth," Graham Holderness
• "Do Not Hide Your Face From Me: The Sacred and Profane Body in Art and Modern Literature," David Jasper

My chapter, "The Desire for Interactivity and the Emerging Texts of the Blogosphere," focuses upon the ways in which the UK emerging church milieu (when I wrote the paper I was using the language of "emerging Christian communities") use online texts, particularly blogs, from the perspective of recent literary theory. I've blogged about it before - here - but wanted to draw attention to it again now we've gone to print!

Paul T.

I went to London for the day yesterday to meet up with Paul Teusner from the School of Applied Communications at RMIT University, Melbourne, whose research into Australian emerging church blogs I've been following for the last couple of years. It was great to meet him in person and to spend a good number of hours chatting about our work and lives. Paul had a camera handy to "pap" me outside Buckingham Palace but I didn't - so I had to steal this one from his online CV. If you want to see me displaying my transcribing injuries follow this link.

Paul's research explores how emerging church bloggers in Australia are constructing individual religious identities, how the Australian blogosphere networks to collectively determine emerging church identity online, and how these online constructions impact the offline identity of the Australian emerging church. His research site is here.

Paul has just been to the Association of Internet Researchers' conference in Copenhagen, "Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place," and for the first time there were a good number of researchers working on religion. Among them a few people I met at the "Religion, Media and Culture: Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age" conference in Oxford last April: Heidi Campbell, Mia Lovheim, and Tim Hutchings. Heidi recently launched a research wiki called Studying Religion and New Media. You can find the PowerPoints for Paul's papers ("Web 2.0 Rhetoric and Realities: Authority, Technorati and Religious Bloggers" and "Religious Podcasting: In Between Religious Audiences and Podcasting Communities") here and here. The paper I wrote for the Oxford conference is scheduled to be published in a book Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age mid-January.

It was great to talk with Paul about the differences between the Australian emerging church and the UK emerging church milieu, and interesting to hear more about the conservative emphases of Christianity (and politics) in Australia. It seems like the OZ emerging church milieu is more theologically conservative and often prefers to articulate its identity in the language of mission and missional to distinguish it from the US emerging church milieu and particularly Emergent Village. Paul met Pete Rollins a while back in Melbourne and it was great to hear a bit about reactions to what Pete and ikon are about. Once we got bored of our theses and moaning about the inner workings of postgrad life, we chatted about Neighbours (of course), horror movies and zombies, Simon Pegg, Brighton, and the pains of not really knowing where we're going to fit when we've submitted. We'll see, eh?

Sexualities Special Issue

The journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society is planning a "Sexuality and Religion/Spirituality" Special Issue for next year. I'm going to (finally) try and finish translating my MA thesis (25,000 words) into an article (6,000 words) and submit it. The call for papers from Andrew Yip reads:

Sex and religion are often considered incompatible. Western culture is often perceived as being increasingly secular and sexualised; and religions, sex-constraining (if not sex-negative), normalising heterosexual marriage. Thus, social scientific study of religion/spirituality which for a long time focuses on macro and meso issues such as secularisation and religious authority structures tends to marginalise the study of religiosity/spirituality on a micro level. Thus, ‘lived’ sexuality – particularly non-heterosexualities – is grossly under-researched within this approach.

On the other hand, the proliferation of social scientific literature on sexuality, including non-heterosexualities, has been encouraging in past decades. Yet, this literature often does not engage with the issue of religion/spirituality. This is particularly evident in literature on lesbian, gay, and bisexual – or more generally queer – sexualities. Indeed, queer identity is often constructed as anti-religion and anti-family (of origin), as religion and family are considered the last bastions of institutionalised heteronormativity and heterosexism.

This Special Issue aims to generate exciting insights into how religion/spirituality informs the ‘doing’ of sexuality, and vice versa, in diverse ways. With the return of religion to the social and geopolitical agenda, it is important that the study of sexuality – its diverse forms, meanings, practices, and significance – should seriously consider the role of institutionalised religion and non-institutionalised spirituality in this process. This will offer us a more nuanced way of understanding contemporary
sexual as well as social identities and lives.

Thus, this Special Issue seeks high-quality theoretical and empirical articles of between 5,500 and 6,000 words. Deadline: Monday 2 March 2009

So the deadline's a way aways, but I'm thinking about this now (procrastination!!!). Here's my (revised) abstract for the piece (you can read the original here) -

Working Title:
'Life-as’ and ‘Subjective-life’ Being and Believing among Lesbian Christians

Abstract:
This article examines Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005) The Spiritual Revolution in the context of non-heterosexual religiosity. It argues that the essentially dualistic nature of the theoretical framework used in the Kendal Project, whilst necessary for testing the subjectivization thesis, rests on the problematic anthropology of ‘life-as’ conformity and ‘subjective-life’ authenticity. I use the voices of a small, localised group of lesbian Christians to queer The Spiritual Revolution’s polarised construction of Western spiritual and religious practitioners’ modes of being and believing. Countering the mutual exclusivity presented in that volume, the women who participated in this study undertake one of several moves available to those in-between Heelas and Woodhead’s poles of internal (‘subjective-life’) and external (‘life-as’) sources of significance and authority. I argue that Heelas’ recent (2008) translation of these classificatory categories into those of transcendent theism (God without) and monistic spirituality (“god” within) is more useful for an analysis of the contemporary religious landscape. This research begins the process of spectrum analysis, suggesting that exploration of LGBT Christian identity integration and reflection upon the work of cognitive dissonance theorists can illuminate ways in which individuals and communities might move even between the dualism of God without and “god” within.