Ecclesial Practices Unit
Ecclesial Practices Unit Call for Papers
American Academy of Religion
Boston 2025
Title: Expressions of Freedom and Unfreedom
What do freedom and unfreedom feel like? What does it feel like to be free from, for, and with? How do feelings of freedom relate to feelings of other concepts such as power, justice, mercy, constraint, resistance, movement, or liberty?
The Ecclesial Practices Unit invites papers that use ethnographic methods, broadly defined, and focus on the potential for qualitative theological methods to access the embodied, emotional, and affective dimensions of experience. We express particular interest in submissions that employ creative qualitative methods and engage a broad range of Christian practices within and beyond traditional ecclesial contexts.
Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
- Practices of liberation, freedom, and unfreedom in established and emerging ecclesial communities, including those with a history of being the oppressors rather than the oppressed.
- Practices of freedom in global contexts, especially in settings where Christian communities experience different forms of restriction and freedom in their practice.
- Expressions or longings of freedom in ecclesial artistic forms such as liturgy, spoken word, testimony, congregational music, visual arts, dance, protest, and more.
- Discourses of freedom embedded in settler mythologies and embodied in contemporary religious practice, including the co-opting of freedom in the perception of Christian persecution in the United States.
- Pedagogies of freedom in religious education that nurture learning in new ways or redefine the classroom. What kind of affective experiences are part of "education as the practice of freedom" (bell hooks, 1994)?
- Engagements with the legacies of embodied freedom and unfreedom in liberation theologies
- Feelings of freedom and constraint concerning purity culture, and sex and sexuality more broadly, in ecclesial settings.
- Reflections on freedom and constraint in the qualitative research process.the
Additional sessions in addition to the panel of submissions (details TBD)
(tentative, details to be confirmed) "Teaching to Live, Learning to Live": A conversation between Dr. Rachelle Green and guest on recent books
Friday Workshop with a possible focus on ethics of teaching at the intersection of theology and ethnography
Ecclesial Practices provides a collaborative space at the intersection of ethnographic and other qualitative approaches and theological approaches to the study of ecclesial practices. This might include churches, other (new, emerging, para-church, and virtual) communities, and lived faith in daily life. International in scope, the unit encourages research contributing to a deeper understanding of “church in practice” in a global context, including decolonization and postcolonial theologies. The unit encourages ongoing research in the following areas: • Empirical and theological approaches to the study of ecclesial communities (churches, congregations, and emerging communities), especially as interdisciplinary efforts to understand lived faith and practice extending from them • Studies of specific ecclesial activities, e.g. music, liturgy, arts, social justice, youth work, preaching, pastoral care, rites of passage, community organizing • Studies of global contexts of lived faith in relation to ecclesial communities, for example, decolonizing and postcolonial theory and theology • Discussions of congregational growth and decline, new church movements, and ecclesial experiments connected to shared practices in a worldly church • Explorations of Christian doctrine in relation to the potential implications of empirical and qualitative research on ecclesial communities and lived faith for discerning, defining, and challenging standard theological genres such as systematics and doctrine, as well as inviting new ways to understand normative logics • Discussions of methodological issues with regard to qualitative research on theological topics, especially related to ecclesial communities and lived faith • Discussions (both substantive and methodological) of the implications of new technologies and digital cultures for ecclesial communities and lived faith
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Rachelle Green, Fordham University | rgreen36@fordham.edu | - | View |
| Rebecca Spurrier | spurrierr@ctsnet.edu | - | View |