The ethics of theological ethnography

Theological ethnographers do not necessarily reject Milbank's argument that theology should not surrender itself to the presuppositions of social science if it is to remain true to its proper subject and to provide an ontological basis for the social reality of the church. However, theologians appealing to the use of ethnographic study do challenge the extent to which Milbank's Christian ontology tends to swallow his ecclesiology and ethics. Nicholas Healy, for instance, contests that such a stance tends to discard the usefulness of various forms of social science in its view of the church, rendering its ecclesiology too pure, abstract and theoretical.Footnote ⁷ More a ‘practical-prophetic’ discipline for a church in medias res rather than a systematic or solely theoretical one, ecclesiology should focus on real practices and on the practical reason related to those activities. Based on such empirical study, moreover, ecclesiologists can then reflect critically on the concrete identity manifest in these practices in order to provide correction, proposing changes where the church's identity and actions belie its Christian witness.Footnote ⁸ Such a view contends that it is too simplistic (and possibly even deceptive) to presume an idealised view of the church and its social reality while neglecting to attend to concrete communities in their complexity, failures and innovations. The import of this difference is profound for training of church leaders.

Real churches are not simple or uniform. Rather, they are dynamic, messy and complicated organisms, incorporating multiple functions. As Healy observers, churches pursue multiple objectives, operating on many levels in their attempt to socialise their members into a distinctive way of life. Among other things, he states, churches serve as ‘a moral guide and teacher’ as well as ‘a forum for moral inquiry’, though some do so with greater success than others. But more like Tolstoy's unhappy families than their happy counterparts, no two churches are exactly the same. Each is different in its own way. Thus, Healy concludes,

If ecclesiology is to be more than ideal, then to get at this dynamic identity and the complexity of the functions of actual churches, ecclesiology needs some kind of empirical method to help describe and assess them. A theological ideal itself will not provide this because it cannot attend to the concrete life of the church; such idealistic blueprints are, correspondingly, of little help to those attempting to lead these institutions and organizations.

To be sure, Milbank himself acknowledges the idealistic character of his ecclesiology and has subsequently called for ‘supplementation by judicious narratives’ in response to this charge.Footnote ¹⁰ Christian Scharen, among others, has picked up this suggestion, arguing that ethnography provides the ‘right-sized tool’ for writing such real ecclesiologies.Footnote ¹¹ The disciplined, close attention to a particular community involved in writing an ethnography not only allows theological claims about the church to be tested against empirical data, but also provides a way of understanding how congregations and communities actually negotiate the complexity, pluralism and interfusion of current cultural and societal arrangements. It is a form of training. Hence, theological ethnography Scharen argues, following Nicholas Adams and Charles Elliot, engages in a deconstruction of ‘the disciplinary divide, calling for theologians to be better students of the real exactly as they see it: both now and not yet’.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, in Scharen's view this practice can serve to correct the ‘crude cultural lens’ of a church–world divide by deploying a more sensitive instrument capable of a closer reading of the actual experience of churchgoers and congregations that can better help the church be the church. Not only does this allow for a more diverse view of faithfulness, but it also can provide vital guidance for how these churches might pursue more faithful practice in the world by helping them see where they have acquiesced to wider culture and how they might embody a more distinctively Christian ethic.Footnote ¹³

I need not recount here the well-rehearsed history of how theological ethicists and ecclesiologists found their way to ethnography in order to point to some of the virtues of this turn for the practical training of ministers.Footnote ¹⁴ First, thick descriptions of real congregations and communities, written from ethnographic studies, have expanded and refined our theoretical conceptions by challenging them with local knowledge on the ground. This process has, in turn, precipitated growth in the wisdom and prudence inherent to the Christian way of life. Additionally, ethnography has stressed the process of continued learning as essential to growth in the Christian faith and church leadership. An example of this can be seen in the ‘creative reflection generated by a wound’ recounted in Mary McClintock-Fulkerson's Places of Redemption.Footnote ¹⁵

Second, ethnographic study's sensitivity to power and the careful consideration of how power flows in the constitution of theology, ecclesiology and ethics has served to enhance the practice of justice so as to inform it more deeply with charity. Too often reliance on theoretical descriptions of the church and its practices for the training of ministers leaves out the role of power dynamics due to a naïve presumption that reason is objective, impersonal and unbiased. Ethnography resists any attempt to elide power in ethical considerations and organisational structures. Instead, it seeks to make power's operations and currents more evident. For instance, the stress on reflexivity and positionality associated with ethnographic writing has facilitated the kind of humility that deepens justice and charity with its attention to the roles played by various persons in the creation of meaning, especially as this opens up more space for those on the margins to speak and offer their theological meaning for themselves. The Italian Jesuit priest and pediatrician, Andrea Vicini, offers such a contribution in his ethnography of indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, articulating his own subjectivity while also detailing how the people offer new insights on hospitality, memory and celebration that challenge and enrich conventional notions.Footnote ¹⁶

Finally, ethnographic practice has contributed to instilling the kind of courage and audacity, born of an emboldened hope that is critical for engaging with real communities and the messiness of ecclesial Christian life. In doing so, it has fostered solidarity by lifting up the way communities act and make meaning together in the face of imposing obstacles. Luke Bretherton proffers an instance of this in his account of London citizens and the role of Christian faith and the church in the quest to recover democratic citizenship for the common good through grassroots organising in an environment of religious pluralism, economic disparity and centralised political power.Footnote ¹⁷ Such research and writing continues to shape theology and ethics (as well as how students are educated in these) in a way that dispels a crude approach that too simplistically subjects practical reason to theory, aligning it more with the dynamic and dialectic activity of moral judgement as it seeks faithfully to understand what it means to be God's people in a particular place and time.Footnote ¹⁸

The limits of ethnography for learning theological ethics

Yet for all of its contributions to theology and ethics, the tool of theological ethnography has some genuine limits. Particularly with regard to the formation of students for practical ministry, some critiques raised by the emerging discipline of post-critical ethnography are pertinent. Post-critical ethnography is by no means a clear and defined approach. Instead, it is more of an ongoing, lively discussion among education scholars informed by critical theory and who make use of qualitative research as an approach to pursue social justice. A ‘craggy terrain’ of dialectic tensions between structures and flows of power, the communities and persons being studied, and the positionality of the researcher, post-critical ethnography is still being defined.Footnote ¹⁹ However, a unifying characteristic of post-critical ethnographers is the acknowledgement that ‘methodological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions are intertwined’, even as they realise there is no easy way of navigating this complex social landscape.Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless, as proponents of this approach increasingly emphasise, something more than observation, interpretation and publication needs to be done. I want to point to two critiques of the practice of theological ethnography identified by this post-critical perspective, because, as I will show, I think theological action research presents a way of addressing them. But before I do, I also want to note an additional issue intrinsic to current theological ethnography when viewed from the perspective of critical theory.

The first of the shortcomings concerns the degree to which the field of theological ethnography fails to grapple with the macro-level social and political conditions that have been unveiled by critical theory, and which shape so much of human life on the ground. This sort of analysis need not fall prey to sociological reductions or predetermined findings based on dominant conceptual categories (class warfare, for instance), and it can help us recognise the role broader frameworks and larger forces play in structuring of human actions, desires and relations. Thus, articulating one's own social position is only partially helpful if one does not also connect this articulation to the broader, more insidious register of what Fredric Jameson has called the ‘political unconscious’.Footnote ²¹ At a time when the workings of the global market play such an evident role in directing and configuring society and individual action, a larger vision of the whole via theory remains essential if we are to avoid simply reiterating the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ by performing a fragmentary postmodern practice of what one ethnographer, following C. Wright Mills, has called ‘isolated interpretivism’.Footnote ²²

Theological ethics and ethnography, therefore, must incorporate a discussion of the framing effects of these larger and higher level forces, because a vision of liberation that is not so informed remains too vague and too open to distortion. For not only do modern forms of captivity and oppression legitimate themselves by offering their own promises of liberation (a point of agreement between theologians and genealogists like Foucault), but also (and from a specifically theological perspective) a wider view of the prevailing disfigurations that plague society are essential for delimiting a Christian alternative to the idolatry of the market.Footnote ²³ Hence, a theological vision oriented by unity and peace is even more important for Christian ethics in a context where the promise of liberation offered by the secular order moves toward fragmentation and individualisation, thereby distorting notions of justice. To the extent that ethnography does not incorporate this level of analysis, it leaves itself open to dissolution in endless subjectivism and atomization, and students trained in this discipline will remain unaware of how they are being formed by such structures.

Of course, there are problems of being too theoretically dependent, and much of post-critical ethnography has attempted to try to respond to this risk. For instance, Kathy Hytten, a scholar in educational studies, argues that all too often ‘critical researchers substitute one form of hegemony for another’.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, while gleaning from the insights of critical theory, post-critical ethnographers recognise that the primary responsibility of researchers is to the people studied, such that their research should be accessible to participants, and participants should be meaningfully involved in the research process.Footnote ²⁵

A second limitation of ethnographic practice, thus, is a tendency toward a monological mode of representation, interpretation, and discernment where scholars and their scholarship drive the account. Too often ethnography has itself engaged in ‘evasions of dialogue’ that exclude the community – even when it portrays itself as not doing so.Footnote ²⁶ Such a move may even at times involve certain reflexive scripts that perform humility, but do so in service to an external publishing agenda or for presentation to colleagues and without acknowledging the extent to which ‘methods are ideas and theories in themselves’.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, within the field of post-critical ethnography, questions about the relationship between the researcher and the researched continue to press on ethnographic practice and the vestiges of its colonial origins.Footnote ²⁸

Not only does this line of critique highlight the possible ways ethnography might become merely a new expertise through which insecure theologians and ethicists seek to legitimate themselves to the wider academy, but it also gives rise to a question about who has access to this research, and who engages in it. ‘Without a more developed sense of what a materially and theoretically efficacious relationship between researchers and the researched would look like’, Hytten therefore contends, ‘the ability for there to exist a true dialectic between the macro and micro worlds is compromised.’Footnote ²⁹ In other words, the empirical data subserve a scholarly, theoretical purpose divorced from the interests of those who are the objects of research. While attempts in post-critical ethnography to resolve this persistent issue intensify reflexivity, for theological ethicists this realisation prompts a more comprehensive question about the role of the community in coming to self-awareness, as well as the place of ethical formation and pedagogy in the doing of research itself.

Finally, for post-critical ethnographers as well as for scholars working in the sister field of engaged anthropology, despite the idea that critical ethnographic research aims at social transformation, the most prominent weakness associated with the practice is that it has mostly failed to actually transform the lives of the oppressed.Footnote ³⁰ That is, it has not succeeded in instilling or cultivating the ethical-political powers within subject communities essential to transforming their state. As a result, new calls have emerged within the field for ‘a willingness to get ones hands dirty’ through a more direct and intentional commitment to the enactment and production of ‘moral activity’ that ‘makes [ethnographers] responsible for the world they are producing when they interpret and critique’.Footnote ³¹ At the heart of this last endemic limitation is the need to enfold ethnographic activity within a social process of collective discernment that is active, collaborative, dialogical and formative.

Action research as co-creative, dialogical, and formative

Participatory action research (PAR) is uniquely compatible with the aims of post-critical ethnography and may provide just such a remedy to the limitations outlined above. As a mode of collaborative research and mutual discernment aimed at resolving issues of pressing concern and co-creating the good of human flourishing, it also presents a way of drawing scholars into deep dialogue with local communities for the purpose of generating new knowledge and engaging in shared action. In addition, given the ongoing challenges of ethnography for ethical and political transformation, PAR offers a model of pedagogical, social activity capable of generating the kinds of ethical-political powers necessary for moral development. In this section, I define action research and describe how, as a pedagogical method, it meets the challenges listed above.

To begin, action research is a term coined by the mid-twentieth-century psychologist Kurt Lewin to describe a rather common form of human endeavour, ‘namely, a repeated cycle of four basic moments: planning, acting, fact-finding, analysis’ that builds on itself in compounding, spiralling fashion. Since its origin, it has been oriented toward making transformational change, even as the process has expanded and matured over time.Footnote ³² Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury define action research as

PAR, though broad and diverse in its origins, more recently has become a way of naming more overtly the stress on the collaborative and collective dimension of this process over and against more individual or scholar-driven projects.Footnote ³⁴ Although inclusive of traditional ethnographic practices, PAR is a self-reflective mode of inquiry and practical judgement developed with communities, and it seeks to bring academic knowledge into dialogue with local knowledge through intensive and careful listening in a powerfully cooperative mode of learning. As Romand Coles contends, ‘action research is a relational approach to generating knowledge, practices, communications, and powers’ in a process of ‘deep democratic engagement’ aimed at co-creative solutions born of new knowledge and action generated within these communities of practice.Footnote ³⁵

Action research, as a result, proceeds from intentional relationship building. To do so, it involves scholars and students first in the kind of relational meetings often associated with community organising, in which people's stories, aspirations and frustrations are engaged by listening to their experiences and involvements.Footnote ³⁶ A listening campaign will include many of these meetings with the hope of creating a platform for collaboration in an intentional community of practice. This activity inherently cultivates a profound receptivity among participants, a capacity that tends to build on itself in positive-relational feedback loops as relationships are deepened and solidified.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, as part of PAR, people are brought together in new kinds of ‘academy-community assemblages’ for the purpose of shared action and learning. Additionally, the process of listening evinces issues and concerns (or wounds), as well as shared aspirations, passions and desires that become the focal point for the joint scholarship and community engagement intrinsic to action research.Footnote ³⁸ This relational origin gives them durability and potency while keeping them flexible, so that they do not become rigidly fixated or externally coopted.

A central tenet of PAR is, therefore, its ‘participatory’ nature. In this way it stretches the boundaries of ethnographic research and writing to include more community members and input, counteracting the monological tendency of scholar-centred ethnographic studies with a dialogical and collaborative approach. In this sense, it moves more in line with Arjun Appadurai's call for the ‘right to research’, wherein the very activity of research itself (as a ‘generalized capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know but do not know yet’) is expanded to include all those persons who have a stake in the judgements this research produces.Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, because PAR involves an intentional consideration of power dynamics in the collective generation of research, it incorporates modes of collaborative decision-making and discernment that encourage mutual commitment and expand capability through a shared pursuit of knowledge and social change.

The scaffolding for PAR thus consists of a Freirean form of ‘problem-posing education’ that privileges a pedagogy ‘forged with, not for, the oppressed’, where research is interwoven with teaching and learning. Designed to cultivate a critical consciousness born of dialogue and oriented to intervention and transformation, this approach to learning incites active engagement on the part of all participants, not passive reception or professional ownership.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to PAR, learning that neglects collaborative relationship is incomplete and incompetent. Moreover, it affirms that at the heart of education itself is a process of deep formation. Recognising with ethnography that knowledge itself is deeply intertwined with social relations, PAR nevertheless goes further to engage values and commitments, incorporating them into and letting them guide the process of learning and scholarship.Footnote ⁴¹ When done well, the result is a thick kind of social activity that both involves those who had previously been the subjects of study into the process of knowledge acquisition and production and integrates community building and moral and ethical formation into that very process of inquiry. Intrinsic to PAR, then, is a ‘moral intertwining’ of all participants in an intentional and strategic process.Footnote ⁴² By nature a polyvocal, democratic, layered and co-creative pursuit that focuses as much on the habits, dispositions and shared practices of the community as integral to generating a platform for action, PAR can be described as what anthropologist Lia Haro calls an eth-o-graphy.Footnote ⁴³ Not meant to be merely a clever neologism, eth-o-graphy highlights the dynamic, radically democratic and dialogical, and co-creative nature of moral production inherent to the social activity of cooperative inquiry.

Theological action research as ethical formation

One may already see the possibilities for using the social activity of PAR for reframing how we approach theological education, ethics and training for practical ministry. But let me more explicitly describe how theological action research (TAR) as a method of practical education incorporates formation in Christian ethics while cultivating the collective discernment necessary to make judgements about what it means to be faithful in a specific context and situation. Along the way, I will recount how I have begun to develop such a pedagogical approach with my own graduate ministry students at a Catholic, Jesuit institution. In conclusion, I will point to what this pedagogical approach has meant for the practical ministry component of our programmes and how it has begun to impact the whole of our degree curricula.

Six years ago, I came to Loyola University Chicago's Institute of Pastoral Studies to direct the Contextual Education programme. Contextual education was the place in the curriculum where our students were required to engage in practical experience and to begin to gain fluency in some of the specific skills and roles of their intended profession. A one-semester, fifteen-week course, it was generally taken at the end of a student's programme. Students chose sites based on their own interests and the course was structured around their presentations of brief case studies for small group conversation. While I do not deny the importance of this aspect of practical theological education, I was dissatisfied with the limited and individual-focused structure of the experience and curriculum. Having observed the power of PAR in other arenas, I was convinced that redesigning contextual education in a mode of TAR and its relational approach to the generation of knowledge would prove uniquely potent for the formation and training of ministry students in the pursuit of solidarity, justice and kingdom praxis essential to ecclesial faithfulness.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bringing formal theological education into conversation with local knowledge and experiences, students are instructed in how to build ‘communities of practice’ for textured, collaborative inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁵ The aim is for students to embark with the community in a shared pursuit of knowing God and in discerning what it means to take faithful action in their locations given the issues they face. Relational, participatory, dialogical and initially problem-driven, the dynamic co-learning systems these students develop shape them through a social activity of theological discernment that seeks a deeper understanding of who God is, and thus of who we are to be as God's creatures.

Moving to a TAR model required a number of course modifications. First, it required extending the requirement from one semester to two. This was important for building in the time necessary to form relationships, listen intently and to begin to gather a community of practice. It also meant adding an additional semester of preparation on the front end of the course, during which students learn about TAR, connect to community partners or ministry sites, reflect on their own vocation, social location and identity, and begin to articulate what a TAR project could look like. Thus, the entire process now encompasses three semesters. While working at their site, the students also take a multidimensional anchor course spanning both semesters that includes instructional presentations, skill-based workshops and small, reflection group coaching. The course moves in the rhythm of Ignatian spirituality, organised as a cycle of ‘contemplation in action’ through four steps (or subunits): (1) prayer (oratio), (2) reading (lectio), (3) discernment (iudicare) and (4) work (opus). The aim is to involve students in a social activity of learning that at the same time shapes them in a dynamic practice of eth-o-graphy, bringing method and content closer together.

At their sites, students begin with relationship building and learning the practice of attentive listening, generating trust and accountability. To this end, course workshops provide them some basic ethnographic skills on observation and interviewing, along with training in relational meetings as well as organisational timelining. At the same time, they maintain journals recording what they are learning and tracking their own vocational development. The idea is that, by the end of the first semester, the students will have begun to identify with their site communities a key issue that they plan to investigate, and which emerges from the pressing theological and social questions they are asking. The second semester then picks up on this work of listening and reading in order to begin more research-infused discernment, wherein students construct communities of practice (or action teams) to take up this work. Along the way, they continue to learn to read power dynamics, recruit leaders, address conflict, access relevant research and embark upon an iterative process of co-creating new solutions. At a year-end TAR symposium, students gather to celebrate their work and share their projects with one another, establishing a culture of TAR and generating energy for this activity across the student body.

A central challenge of this process, not unlike the challenge of integrating ethnography with theology, is how to bring formal theological knowledge with its dependence on revelation together with the localised understanding of knowledge intrinsic to action research. As a promising mode of bridging this gap, TAR has found traction in other places, most notably in the Action Research: Community Society (ARCS) group associated with Heythrop College at the University of London. Engaging in collaborative action research projects that bring together local congregations and scholars, ARCS takes a process-oriented view of learning, one based in practice that involves a multi-layered theological conversation that is open to ‘“interruptions”, or “epiphanies”’.Footnote ⁴⁶ But what makes my approach distinct from that of the Heythrop programme’ is that, while both focus on dialogue and collaboration, the TAR curriculum that I have developed is infused with community organising practices that place a greater stress on the need to build ethico-political powers and participatory agency. Convinced that the future of ministry, particularly in our current context, will require the (re)generation of the ministries within which students will serve as much as learning to serve in new ways, I involve them in community-building practices aimed to create a radically democratic social fabric for collective discernment and agency. Thus, in tandem with prayer, ethnographic listening and journaling, my students engage community organising tactics to identify shared interests and issues, build trust and locate the leaders needed to conduct an action research campaign. The effect is to give a more overt ethico-political dimension to TAR.

At the same time, I spur students to practise with their communities the reading of scripture and the investigation of their traditions with the aim of shedding light on the disjunction between the world as it is and as it should be. For us, this includes ongoing exploration of the social teaching of the Catholic tradition and its emphasis on social analysis, but actively connects this examination with justice, peacemaking and liberative practices that allow students to translate the often abstract principles of human dignity, solidarity, common good and equality into the kinds of real collective engagements aimed at transformation called for by liberation theologies. A process that attempts to bridge the distance that too often lingers between the church's social teachings and liberation theologies, the cooperative inquiry at the heart of TAR begins to train students in a methodology of collective critical abduction or theo-political pragmatism essential to negotiating the contours of faithfulness in their communities on the ground.Footnote ⁴⁷ Intrinsically, this ongoing conversation provides a practice of ‘generative theming’, inviting the community to begin to identify the immanent sway of the powers and principalities that shape their reality while also providing a counter-vision that opens the realm of the possible.Footnote ⁴⁸ The resulting collaborative practice of theological interpretation that expands the activity of ethnography interfuses the voices of tradition, scripture and even critical theory with the experience of the people as a way of building capacity for transformative activity, while holding all parties answerable to their shared experience of the issues and their joint endeavour to address them. Here a cooperative investigation involves both macro-level social and political conditions as well as theological vision in a dynamic and receptive process that incorporates and is shaped by the community in situ. This process cultivates a kind of formation that goes well beyond professional competencies and ministerial identity and into moral production and ethical development as well as political practice, while locating the student/scholar within a web of accountability to all the participants, conducting an eth-o-graphy.

Hence, I agree with Elaine Graham that action research focuses on the cultivation of phronesis, and that TAR must function with an Aristotelian focus on the ‘cultivation of character, of disposition’ and the ‘formation of virtue’.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, I contend that it is necessary to go further and locate this ethical formation within its necessary theo-political register so as to infuse it with a more transformational character. This is even more important given the extent to which neoliberal forces and rationality have infused themselves into every facet of society, including theological education.Footnote ⁵⁰ Any possibility for ‘transforming the game’ in a context where capital markets dominate and dictate the shape of human life and action will need a kind of pedagogical political practice resonant with and animated by an alternative vision.Footnote ⁵¹ Nonetheless, Graham is exactly right when she states that ‘Theological action research is about growing in faith and discerning the presence of God in the midst of practical engagement’, while defining its objectives as (1) to understand a situation through careful attention, (2) ‘to praxis-driven change’ and (3) to ethical formation.Footnote ⁵² But I want to add to this a more political dimension, one in which the challenge of change does not merely derive from inner values, but, more radically, from the practice of the rule of Christ in an exercise of Spirit-led communal discernment. Here revealed truth and even its systematic, theoretical propositions come to meet human experience, with all of its complexities and power dynamics, and vice versa, allowing each to shape the other in a community of practical knowledge oriented to transformation. Contrary to some initial suspicions, TAR need not be anti-doxological. Quite the contrary, the church's vision of God and God's work can grow as its ethico-political faculties are enhanced through the action-research cycle.

Furthermore, taking up the insights of David Coghlan, I have situated the TAR programme within Ignatian spirituality, allowing us to develop a comprehensive vision for the programme based on the faith tradition of the institution.Footnote ⁵³ As a cycle of ‘prayer and activity’, Ignatian spirituality as limned by Coghlan offers a framework for TAR that takes for granted God's active and creative involvement with the world.Footnote ⁵⁴ Seeking to be participants in this missio Dei, and thus ‘to act as God acts’, the TAR process maps on to an ongoing examen-style cycle of reflection, experience and action that roots it within spiritual life. Hence, as Coghlan states, ‘For Christians formed in the Ignatian tradition, the reflection in question here is an inquiry into how God is at work in their lives and in the world, and into how God might shape appropriate responses and reactions for here and now.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Such commitment allows for a process of theological inquiry that involves all those involved in this research a process of shared inquiry. As Coghlan contends, Ignatian spirituality in this way ‘presents a contribution to action research that explicitly addresses the experiential knowing that comes from religious faith and how that knowing leads to practical knowing that is in harmony with the presentational and propositional knowing of the Christian community’.Footnote ⁵⁶

My programme is still young, but the power of TAR for theological education and training in practical ministry is already making itself evident, even though my findings must be taken as preliminary at this point. I am very much still learning how to do TAR myself and learning to shepherd students through it. Not every student gets it and administrative challenges are legion. But already students are expressing the depth and multilayered nature of the integrated learning they are gaining. From learning the ethics of racial reconciliation to reconceiving eucharistic ministry and spiritual direction to participating in groups involved in community transformation, students are discovering the powerful learning that takes place in the process of eth-o-graphy. Admittedly, this is hard to do in the span of one academic year, so I am looking for ways to work with community partners in order for future students to build off of previous students’ work, as well as how to expand TAR throughout the entirety of our school's curricula. An additional upshot of doing this is that it deepens our footprint in the wider community and thus raises the possibility of bringing my institution as a whole into richer exchanges of collaboration with actual ministries and organisations.

Moreover, the promise of TAR in our case extends even further, since, as a Catholic university, we must seek to take seriously Pope John Paul II's charge to Catholic universities to be instruments of progress. And as a Jesuit school, our specific tradition calls us to seek to become what the El Salvadorian Jesuit martyr and university rector Ignacio Ellacuría called a proyecto social, or social project.Footnote ⁵⁷ A TAR model of theological education and training in practical ministry serves as a way to recover these mandates. Guiding our students through the process of forging TAR communities of practice, the programme thus provides a platform for pursuing moral and spiritual formation in the pursuit of justice that only becomes possible through such a place-based, participatory and relational, and attentive mode of inquiry.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this way, the institution is beginning to regain a sense of itself as a ‘social force’ while teaching our students that the doing of effective ministry, especially in an age of suspicion toward the church, can take the form of creating these kinds of communities of practice for learning.Footnote ⁵⁹ Such an endeavour is not easy. It requires community, faculty and administrative buy-in, which is not always easy to obtain given the competition, isolation and neoliberal policies so prevalent in both academy and congregations. But the potential it holds for helping theological institutions rediscover the good they are supposed to serve for the church, the public and the world is significant.