Faith in My Bones FINAL

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Vanderbilt Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive FAITH IN MY BONES: AN EXERCISE IN ETHNOGRAPHIC THEOLOGY By Natalie Wigg-Stevenson Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Religion August, 2011 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Date: Ellen T. Armour June 15th, 2011 Ted A. Smith June 15th, 2011 Paul DeHart June 15th, 2011 Graham Reside June 15th, 2011 John Thatamanil June 15th, 2011 For the members of our Sunday night “Topics in Theology” classes… especially, Ritchie. And for the members of First Baptist Church, Nashville… most of all, Tyler. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Perhaps it is rare for a dissertation to bear traces of one’s parents as explicitly as does mine. My dad, a former boxer, taught me how to throw and land a punch before Wacquant ever stepped in a ring. And my mum’s cameo in chapter five affirms what I have long known to be true: I would not be who I am if you were not the woman you are. My first thanks are thus due to Andy and Chantal. You might not have drilled into me that a girl can do anything a boy can do had you known I’d become a theologian and Baptist minister! Your support in both endeavors has been a gift, and I am thankful for it. No one in my world is as fiercely loyal, giving, and loving as my sister, Danielle. Each time this project has fallen apart, you’ve been on the phone, helping me gather up the pieces to keep going. You’re my BFF for whom I’ll always check the box. Thank you for being both my sanity and my heart. Each project like this is indebted to a line of teachers who contributed to its scholarly shape: Alison McQueen ignited the aesthetic sensibilities that continue to undergird my theological projects. John Robertson convinced me on to the path of theological study when I didn’t quite know where I was going and taught me to trust my instincts. Siobhan Garrigán uncovered and nurtured a theological voice I didn’t know I had and introduced me to the ethnographic study of concrete practices. Serene Jones nurtured some of the craziest, unconventional theological whims with which I have experimented. I am grateful to each one of you. Thank you! I am aware that the gift of dissertation advisors is not to be taken lightly and in this regard, I have been immeasurably blessed. Ellen Armour, Ted Smith, Graham iii Reside, Paul Dehart, and John Thatamanil have each offered crucial guidance and encouragement throughout my time at Vanderbilt. Graham, thank you – warmly – for both your intellectual and emotional support throughout this project. Ted, no one has ever read my work with such rigor and generosity. I am humbled by your dedication, and hope that I can be half the teacher you are. I really won the adviser lottery with Ellen. There is no scholar with whom I would have rather taken this journey. And I am not sure if there is anyone at Vandy with whom I have laughed harder. Advising meetings with you are consistently fun, even as you challenge me to push myself to and beyond the limits of what I thought I could do. I continue to marvel at the subversive delight to your ordination charge for me, just as I marvel with delight at the gift you have been to me in these past five years. Thank you. First Baptist Church, Nashville: I don’t want to leave. Thank you, Boling/Vaughn Sunday School class for putting up with this crotchety, doubt-filled theologian for these past few years. And thank you to my Sunday night classes, simply for being awesome. I have learned so much from all of you guys. I am deeply grateful to Pastor Frank and those who served on my ordination committee, as well as each hand that made it through the line that day in May when you named me, “Rev.” In all its strengths and weaknesses, FBC has taught me what church is and can be. And I am blessed for it. Thank you to The Lilly Foundation for my Theology and Practice fellowship, which made the timely completion of this project possible. The T&P Program has been more formative for me than I imagined possible. I am honored to be a member of its inaugural class, and am deeply grateful for all the members of “Team Awesome” – Jin, iv Angela, Sean, Kate and Asante. I own a special debt of gratitude to Kate Lassiter, with whom I have learned that when all else fails, we just have to “make it work!” Travis Ables and Steve Jungkeit both read this dissertation and offered feedback that was both insightful and challenging. Travis, whether it’s about God, tv, music, films, or some other life-defining topic, our conversation always takes me into a deeper sense for the richness and complexity of life. Steve, the ways of thinking theologically that we have hammered out together on forest paths and in far-flung cities have brought me immense joy. I am grateful, both of you, for your friendships. Thank you. And finally, Tyler, how do I thank you? Tyler, more than anyone, has come to understand the particular ways in which I long to live deeply in the place where mind, body and spirit connect. He has read multiple drafts of this dissertation, always offering crucial revisions, while finding ways to keep me honest, both to my community and to myself. Tyler has mixes me drinks and makes me dinner at the end of hard days. He has an uncanny knack for a well-timed “habitus” joke. And in the midst of all these gifts, he understood that I had to dedicate this work to someone else, which is why I could not resist splitting the dedication between you both. If I can be half as much help to you in this process five years from now as you have been to me in these past five years, you’ll be laughing, my love. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………...1 Faith in My Bones… ……………………………………………………………9 First Baptist Church, Nashville…………………………………………………13 Life Change University…………………………………………………………16 An Exercise in Ethnographic Theology… ……………………………………..18 II. THEOLOGICAL PRACTICES OF CONVERSATION……………………………23 A Dinner Party…………………………………………………………………..23 Life Change University………………………………………………………….36 The Turn to Culture in Academic Theology…………………………………….39 Cultural Practices and the Theological Continuum……………………………..42 Research Questions………………………………………………………………48 Conversations Across the Theological Continuum………………………………54 Remembering Wine and Supper…………………………………………………65 III. THEOLOGICAL PRACTICES OF PURSUING WISDOM……………………….68 Making Theologians…………………………………………………………….68 Habitus: A Definition……………………………………………………………72 Theologia and the Pursuit of Wisdom…………………………………………..78 Competition and Coherence Between Habitus in the Pursuit of Wisdom………82 Making (and Remaking…) Theologians………………………………………..98 IV. THEOLOGICAL PRACTICES OF TEACHING………………………………….103 A Role for Ethnography in Theological Reflection…………………………….105 From Frontier to Institutional Theologies………………………………………110 From Participant Observation to Participant Objectification…………………..121 From Participant Objectification to Objectified Participation………………….124 Physical vs. Bodily Practices…………………………………………………...133 The Problems and Possibilities of Habitus as Tool…………………………….136 An Expanded Role for Ethnography in Theological Construction…………….141 vi V. THEOLOGICAL PRACTICES IN ATYPICAL SPACE…………………………..149 Self-Implicating Method and My Ecclesial Role……………………………....155 Self-Implicating Method and My Academic Role…………………………...…160 Cogs in the Machine……………………………………………………………168 The Classroom as Atypical Space………………………………………………175 New Tools for Our Tool-Kits………………………………..…………………183 VI. PRACTICES OF PERFORMANCE THEOLOGY………………………………..196 Performance Theology………………………………………………………….201 Mystical Enough for a Baptist?. ………………………………………………..208 My Mother’s Hips………………………………………………………………225 VII. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………242 The Potential Hybridity of Everyday Christians. ………………………………247 The Hybridity of Academic Theologians as a Tool…………………………….253 The Hybridity of Academic Theologians as a Topic…………………………...255 Power in Practices of Conversation…………………………………………….258 Emotions in Practices of Conversation…………………………………………261 Situating Conversations in Space……………………………………………….264 Serving the Church and Academy……………………………………………...269 Appendix A. TOPICS IN THEOLOGY: JESUS CHRIST AND SALVATION…………….275 B. TOPICS IN THEOLOGY: GOD AS TRINITY………………………………..278 BIBLIOGRAPHY….…………………………………………………………………..281 vii INTRODUCTION The “turn to culture” in academic theology has been much documented and discussed.1 Whether this turn has sought to analyze church cultures, correlate the spheres associated with ecclesial, academic and everyday life, or engage the practices of marginalized peoples in an effort to disrupt and reshape the normative assumptions of mainstream theology, this turn to culture has comprised a simultaneous turn to anthropological or sociological theories and, at times, methods. Liberation, liturgical, feminist, womanist and mujerista theologies, for example, have all employed ethnographic methods in order to study the beliefs and practices of concrete communities. And in so doing, they have demonstrated the rich resources to be mined in the practices of everyday Christian faith for the doing of academic theology. Turning to culture both as a source for theological reflection and as an analytic category for interpreting the field and methods of our study gives rise to a number of important questions. What voices in culture have and have not, and might need to be heard? What best practices enable such hearing, and how then do we interpret what we have heard? Which other academic disciplines might prove most helpful to our 1 For two comprehensive, collaborative studies of this turn to culture in academic theology, see Sheila Davaney & Dwight N. Hopkins, Changing Conversations: Cultural Analysis and Religious Reflection (New York: Routledge, 1996) and Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner ed., Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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