This panel considers the theoretical, historical, and practical considerations around collaborations between scholars of local religion and practitioners such as religious leaders, activists, non-profit collaborators, and government officials. Panelists include an organizer who led an interfaith initiative around affordable housing in Colorado, a scholar who examines walking as a means of co-creating knowledge, a city planner who explores public service as a ministry and the city as a congregation, and a scholar who directs a set of practitioner-oriented, campus-community programs in religious literacy and interfaith leadership. This session will explore questions such as: How do collaborations between scholars and practitioners offer new forms of scholarly analysis and knowledge production? How do scholar-practitioners negotiate their multiple roles? What ethical questions arise in interactions between scholars and practitioners?
This paper explores a case study of one congregation’s attempt to develop affordable housing on their land—their animating theological imagination and the widening web of political engagements and solidarities produced by their conscientization—as an example of “iterative orthopraxy” through which “the real” and “right action” are progressively revealed. Thinking with Freire, Sobrino, and Dussel, I develop a theory of action as a transformative-epistemological method. Foregrounding the iterativity of orthopraxy underscores that actors cannot a priori know which concrete collective actions constitute “the good.” Each subsequent action made in solidarity toward liberation and life is a refined best approximation. The humility required and instilled by the space of unknowing demonstrates the spirituality of such praxis. I proceed to reflect on the revised portrait of relations and contradictions generated by this case, particularly with respect to the political-economy of property, and the questions such revelations raise for practitioners.
Reflecting on San Bernardino’s recent history, its current issues such as the growing unhoused population and the realities of living on the streets – this paper discusses co-walking methodologies as a way to explore social, religious, spiritual and theological subjects in conversation with street life. Can walks and conversations with a church community leader serving the unhoused population provide an entry into a co-created conversation that explores urban religion in the streets and more? The paths and places that we walked were selected by both researcher and community leader, which in turn allowed the church leader to also direct the walk, experiences we had and the topics we explored. With walking methods in view, this paper suggests how scholars and community members may create shared-forms of knowledge on religion as it exists in these city streets, how religion and the city problems interact and bring attention to problems in the city.
What might our interrelationship with one another teach us about community development? What is the spiritual work required to foster a more beloved community? This engagement with practical theology examines the role of a city planner (a public sector role) as a ministerial and pastoral profession through Black, Buddhist, and Christian prophetic traditions. This paper asserts a framework for understanding neighboring is: a) a critical path for spiritual development, b) a vocational path/ministry, and c) a form of pastoral care and spiritual imagination.
Moving beyond proximity is a call to karmic action that deals with the material, spiritual, and civic aspects of the places we inhabit. By integrating the practical, liturgical, and theological aspects of the sangha as experienced through the lens of place, this paper proposes a framework for a socially engaged application to public service and city planning that aims to omit no one in the process.
For twelve years, I have directed a set of practitioner-oriented, campus-community programs in religious literacy and interfaith leadership while at the same time publishing, teaching, and presenting in the critical study of religion. Wearing these “two hats” can produce a fair amount of internal conflict. Thus I routinely wrestle with the three exemplary issues for this session: how to bring a measure of rigor to the scholar-practitioner dialogues and interactions that I participate in and program, how to negotiate these two different roles within myself and with my students in the classroom, and how attune myself to the ethical questions that invariably arise in wearing these two hats in my scholarship, programming, and teaching. Although I do not have hard-and-fast answers or solutions to any of them, I can bring to them a measure of experience and perspective, one from which these issues are not as thorny as might seem.