Harvard Divinity School : 2006 Seminar
Narrative
WHO GETS TO SAY WHAT A RELIGION MEANS?
INSIDERS, OUTSIDERS, AND EVERYBODY IN BETWEEN
HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL
On a late October afternoon, sixty students sit in a room that is slightly too small and slightly too warm for comfort to think together about ministry. A young white woman from Texas seeking ordination in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship sits next to a Unitarian-Universalist man from New York City. An African American woman from a Disciples of Christ church in Atlanta talks quietly with a red-haired young woman who dropped out of a doctoral program in French literature to become an Episcopal priest. An older white man, an American convert to Buddhism, opens a book to show a passage to a life-long Presbyterian who is starting to feel very drawn to the liturgical traditions of the Episcopal Church. A straight Roman Catholic woman and a gay Roman Catholic man sit chatting with two students—a woman moving into her second career and a young man fresh out of college—preparing for ordination in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. A white Evangelical woman and an African-American evangelical man—both of whom find the whole business of denominations irrelevant to what they understand Christianity to be—laugh over a story told to them by a young white woman who isn’t sure what she’s doing in an M.Div. program, but can’t imagine doing anything else that would feel as right as this. On the front row, a Pentecostal student who emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti as a teenager, a Hispanic Unitarian-Universalist woman, a white, middle-aged man who has left the business world to pursue ordination in the United Church of Christ, a white Presbyterian woman who isn’t sure whether she wants to be in ministry or in the foreign service, a student who is writing a novel and thinks that maybe fiction is the form her ministry will take, and a young African-American man who hopes to combine his training in engineering and development with his passion for ministry in Kenya, take out their books and notebooks and get ready for the class to begin.
This is Introduction to Theological Education for Ministry, known in HDS shorthand as ITEM. The course meets each week in two 90-minute blocks: a lecture meeting with the whole class in which four members of the faculty spend 3 weeks each helping the students (and themselves) imagine the potential relations between a particular field of study (the study of theology, the study of religion, the study of scripture, and the study of history) and the practices of ministry; and a section meeting of 12–14 students in which students offer 10-minute spiritual/intellectual autobiographies, learn to respond to the stories of others, and discuss a variety of accounts of ministry, ranging from Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, to George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance,” to Samuel Freedman’s Upon this Rock: Miracles of a Black Church.
The faculty (two professors of ministry studies), teaching fellows (a Th.D. student in theology and the school’s chaplain), and the lecturer for the unit on the study of religion (a professor of American religious history who teaches in both HDS and Harvard College) enter the room and the murmur of voices dies down. “He’s a good teacher,” the Cooperative Baptist says to the Unitarian Universalist. “Yes, he is,” he replies, “but I’ll be interested to see if he can make some more connections to ministry with this book.”
After announcements and greetings, the instructor begins moving around the room, greeting students, many of whom he knows by name. (He spent time at the beginning of his first lecture asking every student’s name and the place from which they came to HDS.) “How did you enjoy the reading?” he asks, and a few words float up from the class: “Strange.” “Interesting.” “Inspiring.” “Kind of frightening.” “Moving.”
The book the instructor has asked the students to read over these three weeks is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, a book about a vodou priestess who emigrated from Haiti to Brooklyn and around whom a vibrant vodou community has grown. The book was written by a white American female academic who comes, through her study of the priestess and her community, first to admire, and then to involve herself in the ritual life of this community, eventually marrying two of the spirits who regularly “mount” the priestess and speak to the community. The book gives thick, rich descriptions of both the materiality of the religious practices of the community and the many ways these practices anchor the lives of the participants.
The instructor came to HDS a few years earlier from a religion department in a state university. He is still rather new to the teaching of M.Div. students, but he has embraced the task with energy and excitement. Still, the course is a bit of a tightrope walk, for him, for the students, and for the instructors who convene the course. The potential intersections between the practices of ministry and the study of religion are not always obvious. Sometimes they need to be excavated. Sometimes they need to be invented.
The instructor has been asking the students not to rush to make judgments, theological or otherwise, about this religion, at least until they have read the whole book and learned as much as they can about this religious world. He has them name the foods found on the altar, the color of people’s clothing, the objects held in people’s hands, the words spoken by participants. He asks them to pay as much attention to what people are doing as to what they are believing.
The middle-aged UCC man on the first row raises his hand. “Would you ask us to postpone our judgment if this was a book about a cannibal religion?” “Absolutely,” the instructor replies. “I’d want you to understand the religious world and the ways in which it has taken shape before you made a judgment.”
Disciplined attention to the other has been a big theme of the sessions with this visiting instructor. When the UU student asks what this way of studying religion has to do with ministry, the whole class, including the instructor himself, pauses to think.
“Disciplined attention to the other is the pastoral practice par excellence,” one of the instructors who convenes the class, a teacher in the field of ministry studies, says.
“I really like the idea of paying as much attention to what people in a religious community are doing, as to what they are believing,” the Baptist woman says. “I’ve been in a lot of churches where we talk endlessly about what we believe, but what we do often doesn’t reflect that. I think ministers need to know how to pay attention to what communities are or are not actually doing.”
“What about postponing theological judgment, though,” says the UCC student. “Ministers are theologians, and if they’re not, they’re not doing their job.”
“I don’t know,” says one of the women involved in prison ministry. “The incarcerated men I work with have had a lot of judgment placed on them. A minister willing to hold off on judging might offer them a little space to breathe and to be known.”
A Sufi student raises his hand. “When I walk into a hospital room, sometimes all I know is the person’s religious affiliation. If I make judgments based only on that, I’m not going to be a good minister to that person. I need to know how to hold off, how to wait until I can see everything that’s on the altar, as you said, professor.”
Little by little, as the conversation continued, unexpected points of intersection between the book, the intellectual practices of the study of religion advocated and modeled by the instructor, and the practice of ministry began to emerge, especially in relation to the question of what it means to know another, what practices make it possible for us, as ministers and as scholars, to be present to a religion, a practice, a person in a way that resists turning that religion, practice or person into something familiar, something more like ourselves. And it became clear that this question was central to all of our studies as well as to the practice of ministry itself.
The conversation began to turn towards the question: Who gets to say what a religion is, what it means? The scholar standing ‘outside’? The minister standing ‘inside’? The book disrupted the dichotomy of insider/outsider as we watched the scholar, the ‘outsider,’ gradually move deeper and deeper ‘inside’ the vodou community. Could we trust her?
“This isn’t scholarship,” the student who had asked about cannibals maintained. “This is a little voyage of self-discovery. We’re learning more about the author than we are about the community.”
“I disagree,” the woman preparing for ministry in the A.M.E. said. “It’s a relief to me to see a scholar being honest about how her study of people who aren’t like her actually affected her.”
“Are we supposed to believe in these spirits, though?” the Presbyterian woman asked. “The author seems to want us to.”
“I don’t know,” the Roman Catholic man said. “I think she’s just leaving the question of realness undecided. She’s taking things at face value and seeing what they might mean. I like not having to decide whether these spirits are ontologically ‘real’ or not. The spirits are real to the community. They are agents of liberation.”
All this time, the Pentecostal student from Haiti sat quietly listening. Now he spoke up. “My mother,” he said, “was possessed by one hundred and twenty-one spirits. Vodou was not liberation for my mother—she served the spirits because she was afraid they would hurt her if she didn’t. Christianity liberated her, and our whole family.”
The room fell silent for a moment, as the theoretical question of “who gets to say what a religion means?” was suddenly and vividly embodied.
WHO GETS TO SAY WHAT A RELIGION MEANS?
INSIDERS, OUTSIDERS, AND EVERYBODY IN BETWEEN
HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL
On a late October afternoon, sixty students sit in a room that is slightly too small and slightly too warm for comfort to think together about ministry. A young white woman from Texas seeking ordination in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship sits next to a Unitarian-Universalist man from New York City. An African American woman from a Disciples of Christ church in Atlanta talks quietly with a red-haired young woman who dropped out of a doctoral program in French literature to become an Episcopal priest. An older white man, an American convert to Buddhism, opens a book to show a passage to a life-long Presbyterian who is starting to feel very drawn to the liturgical traditions of the Episcopal Church. A straight Roman Catholic woman and a gay Roman Catholic man sit chatting with two students—a woman moving into her second career and a young man fresh out of college—preparing for ordination in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. A white Evangelical woman and an African-American evangelical man—both of whom find the whole business of denominations irrelevant to what they understand Christianity to be—laugh over a story told to them by a young white woman who isn’t sure what she’s doing in an M.Div. program, but can’t imagine doing anything else that would feel as right as this. On the front row, a Pentecostal student who emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti as a teenager, a Hispanic Unitarian-Universalist woman, a white, middle-aged man who has left the business world to pursue ordination in the United Church of Christ, a white Presbyterian woman who isn’t sure whether she wants to be in ministry or in the foreign service, a student who is writing a novel and thinks that maybe fiction is the form her ministry will take, and a young African-American man who hopes to combine his training in engineering and development with his passion for ministry in Kenya, take out their books and notebooks and get ready for the class to begin.
This is Introduction to Theological Education for Ministry, known in HDS shorthand as ITEM. The course meets each week in two 90-minute blocks: a lecture meeting with the whole class in which four members of the faculty spend 3 weeks each helping the students (and themselves) imagine the potential relations between a particular field of study (the study of theology, the study of religion, the study of scripture, and the study of history) and the practices of ministry; and a section meeting of 12–14 students in which students offer 10-minute spiritual/intellectual autobiographies, learn to respond to the stories of others, and discuss a variety of accounts of ministry, ranging from Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, to George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance,” to Samuel Freedman’s Upon this Rock: Miracles of a Black Church.
The faculty (two professors of ministry studies), teaching fellows (a Th.D. student in theology and the school’s chaplain), and the lecturer for the unit on the study of religion (a professor of American religious history who teaches in both HDS and Harvard College) enter the room and the murmur of voices dies down. “He’s a good teacher,” the Cooperative Baptist says to the Unitarian Universalist. “Yes, he is,” he replies, “but I’ll be interested to see if he can make some more connections to ministry with this book.”
After announcements and greetings, the instructor begins moving around the room, greeting students, many of whom he knows by name. (He spent time at the beginning of his first lecture asking every student’s name and the place from which they came to HDS.) “How did you enjoy the reading?” he asks, and a few words float up from the class: “Strange.” “Interesting.” “Inspiring.” “Kind of frightening.” “Moving.”
The book the instructor has asked the students to read over these three weeks is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, a book about a vodou priestess who emigrated from Haiti to Brooklyn and around whom a vibrant vodou community has grown. The book was written by a white American female academic who comes, through her study of the priestess and her community, first to admire, and then to involve herself in the ritual life of this community, eventually marrying two of the spirits who regularly “mount” the priestess and speak to the community. The book gives thick, rich descriptions of both the materiality of the religious practices of the community and the many ways these practices anchor the lives of the participants.
The instructor came to HDS a few years earlier from a religion department in a state university. He is still rather new to the teaching of M.Div. students, but he has embraced the task with energy and excitement. Still, the course is a bit of a tightrope walk, for him, for the students, and for the instructors who convene the course. The potential intersections between the practices of ministry and the study of religion are not always obvious. Sometimes they need to be excavated. Sometimes they need to be invented.
The instructor has been asking the students not to rush to make judgments, theological or otherwise, about this religion, at least until they have read the whole book and learned as much as they can about this religious world. He has them name the foods found on the altar, the color of people’s clothing, the objects held in people’s hands, the words spoken by participants. He asks them to pay as much attention to what people are doing as to what they are believing.
The middle-aged UCC man on the first row raises his hand. “Would you ask us to postpone our judgment if this was a book about a cannibal religion?” “Absolutely,” the instructor replies. “I’d want you to understand the religious world and the ways in which it has taken shape before you made a judgment.”
Disciplined attention to the other has been a big theme of the sessions with this visiting instructor. When the UU student asks what this way of studying religion has to do with ministry, the whole class, including the instructor himself, pauses to think.
“Disciplined attention to the other is the pastoral practice par excellence,” one of the instructors who convenes the class, a teacher in the field of ministry studies, says.
“I really like the idea of paying as much attention to what people in a religious community are doing, as to what they are believing,” the Baptist woman says. “I’ve been in a lot of churches where we talk endlessly about what we believe, but what we do often doesn’t reflect that. I think ministers need to know how to pay attention to what communities are or are not actually doing.”
“What about postponing theological judgment, though,” says the UCC student. “Ministers are theologians, and if they’re not, they’re not doing their job.”
“I don’t know,” says one of the women involved in prison ministry. “The incarcerated men I work with have had a lot of judgment placed on them. A minister willing to hold off on judging might offer them a little space to breathe and to be known.”
A Sufi student raises his hand. “When I walk into a hospital room, sometimes all I know is the person’s religious affiliation. If I make judgments based only on that, I’m not going to be a good minister to that person. I need to know how to hold off, how to wait until I can see everything that’s on the altar, as you said, professor.”
Little by little, as the conversation continued, unexpected points of intersection between the book, the intellectual practices of the study of religion advocated and modeled by the instructor, and the practice of ministry began to emerge, especially in relation to the question of what it means to know another, what practices make it possible for us, as ministers and as scholars, to be present to a religion, a practice, a person in a way that resists turning that religion, practice or person into something familiar, something more like ourselves. And it became clear that this question was central to all of our studies as well as to the practice of ministry itself.
The conversation began to turn towards the question: Who gets to say what a religion is, what it means? The scholar standing ‘outside’? The minister standing ‘inside’? The book disrupted the dichotomy of insider/outsider as we watched the scholar, the ‘outsider,’ gradually move deeper and deeper ‘inside’ the vodou community. Could we trust her?
“This isn’t scholarship,” the student who had asked about cannibals maintained. “This is a little voyage of self-discovery. We’re learning more about the author than we are about the community.”
“I disagree,” the woman preparing for ministry in the A.M.E. said. “It’s a relief to me to see a scholar being honest about how her study of people who aren’t like her actually affected her.”
“Are we supposed to believe in these spirits, though?” the Presbyterian woman asked. “The author seems to want us to.”
“I don’t know,” the Roman Catholic man said. “I think she’s just leaving the question of realness undecided. She’s taking things at face value and seeing what they might mean. I like not having to decide whether these spirits are ontologically ‘real’ or not. The spirits are real to the community. They are agents of liberation.”
All this time, the Pentecostal student from Haiti sat quietly listening. Now he spoke up. “My mother,” he said, “was possessed by one hundred and twenty-one spirits. Vodou was not liberation for my mother—she served the spirits because she was afraid they would hurt her if she didn’t. Christianity liberated her, and our whole family.”
The room fell silent for a moment, as the theoretical question of “who gets to say what a religion means?” was suddenly and vividly embodied.