His watchfulness was such that he often passed the entire night without sleep, and doing this not once, but often, he inspired wonder. He ate once daily, after sunset, but there were times when he received food every second and frequently even every fourth day… A rush mat was sufficient to him for sleeping, but more regularly he lay on the bare ground…Girding himself in this way, Antony went out to the tombs that were situated some distance from the village. He charged one of his friends to supply him periodically with bread, and he entered one of the tombs and remained alone within, his friend having closed the door on him. When the enemy could stand it no longer—for he was apprehensive that Antony might before long fill the desert with the discipline—approaching one night with a multitude of demons he whipped him with such force that he lay on the earth, speechless from the tortures…But by God’s providence (for the Lord does not overlook those who place their hope in him), the friend came the next day bringing him the loaves. Opening the door and seeing him lying, as if dead, on the ground, he picked him up and carried him to the Lord’s house in the village, and laid him on the earth. And many of his relatives and the people of the village stationed themselves by Antony as beside a corpse. But around midnight, coming to his senses and wakening, Antony, as he saw everyone sleeping, and only his friend keeping the watch, beckoned to him and asked him to lift him again and carry him to the tombs, waking no one. So he was taken back there by the man and, as before, the door was closed. Again he was alone inside.

athanasius, Life of Antony

In the mid-twentieth century, many in church and academy announced the “anthropological turn,” also known as the “turn to the person,” in theology.¹ The only problem is that such theology remained as abstract as ever, the “anthropological turn” involving simply a theologically-inflected philosophical understanding of the person. However, historically, various authors have long theologized by beginning with concrete accounts of specific persons. The genre of the bios, as in Athanasius’ Life of Antony is just one case in point. Butler’s Lives of the Saints is another. There is also the genre of the confession, from Augustine’s Confessions to Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. If we include accounts of fictional characters, then we would need to cite, for instance, Undset, Chesterton, Greene, Hurston, O’Connor, Percy, Morrison, and Robinson. The problem is rather that the academy has long ruled that such ways of doing theology were not what professors, as professors, do. We might research Athanasius, but we dare not write like him.

This is the case even though the burgeoning of the use of ethnographic methods for the doing of theology has been taking place for some time now. Just how long depends on what we take as the beginning of the shift. We can track with Elizabeth Phillips and identify the starting point with narrative theology and practical theology,² or, like Stephanie Mota Thurston, we can turn to the liberationist sources of womanist and mujerista theology.³ And these sources need not be mutually exclusive.⁴

Academics in the discipline of anthropology took the implications of their own “interpretive turn” in the 1980s to develop a variety of modes of representation, including creative or narrative nonfiction, poetry, auto-ethnography, theatrical performance, and experimental film.⁵ Will we academic theologians do likewise?

This special section of Ecclesial Practices, and the journal more broadly, is an argument by example in the affirmative. The journal has previously featured special sections addressing the “ethnographic turn” in Christian Ethics (2021/1) and the significance of the “crisis in representation” in the field of anthropology for ethnographic approaches to academic theology (2021/2). Now we ask and address whether and how ethnographic approaches to theology can and should shape the genres in which we write.

There are ways of researching and writing theology that are better than others for doing the job. That has to do with one of (practical-)theology’s core intentions: writing and describing is not intended to duplicate or represent reality but to transform it as well. Or, as Natalie Wigg-Stevenson stated, it is about ‘a critical ethnographic pedagogy for transformative theological education’.⁶ Wigg-Stevenson indicates that if we want use ethnography for more than just description, it has to be reshaped and remodeled. Following Freire, she states that the goal of such pedagogy is for student and teacher to become allies in transforming the world, as partly as it may be. Such ethnographical theology is not ‘just ethnography’. It is neither just part of the academic curriculum as a subject, nor writing pieces as a showcase on one’s outstanding cv. The contributions in this volume indicate that they want to go beyond that. There is something at stake, and it takes much pain and effort to ‘compose’ articles in such a way that they more adequately align with the causes they describe – as the attempts in this issue show.

In a way, the contributions below are perhaps more essays. An essayer is someone who tries, attempts. Triers render themselves vulnerable as well: they are not the omniscient experts that save the world. The essayists here captivate elements of the core vulnerability which accompanies theology. They describe vulnerabilities in themselves, in the conversations, in their interactions.⁷ They challenge genre and language alike.⁸ We think it is apt for a journal in the field of Ecclesiology and Ethnography that we encourage this humility, a posture that “is willing to engage rigorous self-critique” as Chris Scharen calls it.⁹ It is this humility and vulnerable dispossession that Scharen calls the ‘theology’ side of fieldwork in theology¹⁰ which might even be characterized as worship.¹¹

So, what fieldwork can we expect to dive into? The section moves in the rough chronological order of the sources which inspire the articles. It leads off with a piece by Marie-Claire Klassen, “Can the Theological Ethnographer Pray?: Re-Reading Interview Transcriptions through Lectio Divina.” In it, Klassen presents the medieval spiritual method of lectio divina, shows how a theological ethnographer might incorporate it into her research and writing, and then invites the reader into the practice in a step-by-step way. This article is followed by Todd Whitmore’s “Infernal Anamnesis: Dante, Theology, and Writing Addiction.” Here, he both makes and displays the case that a poetics indebted to Dante serves much better to represent the full range of what is at stake in addiction than does the traditional and far more common treatise genre of theology indebted to scholasticism. Next, Nicole Symmonds,’ “Mas to Mass: Mapping Convergences Between Trinidad Carnival Performance and Black Catholic Liturgy,” draws upon first-person participation in both Trinidad Carnival (which dates back to the 18th century) and Catholic mass to display how the former is more religious than usually portrayed and the latter is more sensual than often acknowledged, thus narrowing for Black Catholics the commonly perceived gap between the two celebrations. In, “Finding Words: Risk and Requirements in Theological Ethnographic Writing,” Jackson Wolford provides an alternative to a narrowly social scientific use of ethnography in theology by offering an account of his ever-changing relationship with his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Again, the aim is to display even more than to explain. Rebecca Spurrier, in her article, “Captivated by the Normate and Summoned by the Holy Many: A Conversion Story,” unfolds her own story of encounter with dominant assumptions about what is normal as a means of identifying, hunting, and flushing out those assumptions, and ends in challenging you, the reader, to do likewise. It is fitting, then, that Kyle Lambelet gives us a response to the articles that is every bit as experimental as the articles themselves. We hope you enjoy the offerings.