Call for Proposals: Special Issue of Ecclesial Practices
Ecclesial Practices invites article proposals for a special issue oriented around emerging questions in ethnographic fieldwork in Christian Ethics. Abstracts are due June 30, 2019, with full manuscript drafts due September 30, 2019 in time to workshop them in the fall over video conference. Abstract submissions should be sent to: FieldworkinEthicsSCE@
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While fieldwork of some sort has long been a part of of social ethics and congregational studies, in the past fifteen years an increasing number of scholars in Christian ethics have embarked on innovative research projects utilizing participant observation, interviews, and other methods of qualitative analysis. New book series have launched such as the T&T Clark Studies in Social Ethics, Ethnography and Theology; distilling volumes have been published like Vigen and Scharen’s Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics; and the journal of Ecclesial Practices sustains conversations in this burgeoning field.
Although sharing common ground in the use of ethnographic methods, the theological impetus for these projects remain diverse. Post-liberals, who affirm that the church is the primary locus of God’s action in the world, have looked to ecclesial practices as sites of revelation. Liberationists, who affirm God’s preferential option for the poor, have looked to movements for justice in which the marginalized act as subjects for paradigms of ethical and political praxis. While this account of these strands—post-liberal and liberationist—is limited in its descriptive scope, it offers a quick way to organize the diverse projects of Christian ethicists who use ethnographic methods. Beyond methodological overlap, both strands agree that ethnographic methods provide a mode of attending to God’s action in history, variously construed.
Yet, laying bear the overlap as simply (and crassly) as this raises fundamental theological questions. Whether post-liberal or liberationist, these projects gather under a cultural turn that aims to evade the problem of normativity after Lessing’s ditch. Can ethnography succeed where other methods have failed to resolve the persistent gap between fact and norm, between description and prescription, between fallible human utterance and divine Word?
This special issue of Ecclesial Practices aims to take up these fundamental theological problems. The essays sought will both demonstrate ongoing ethnographic research and address the questions of the call: how to relate the post-liberal and liberationist motivations behind this work, and/or the gap between fact and norm. The best submissions will embrace the sense that the “ethnography is the theory” in showing (rather than telling) how it draws upon the specific empirical work of scholars pushing methodological boundaries, while also engaging this constellation of fundamental questions. At root, we seek to explore to what ethnographic methods enable us to attend, the limits of that attention, and how a truly ethnographic theology and ethics might hold the tension between fact and norm together.
Please submit proposals for articles by June 30, 2019 to FieldworkinEthicsSCE@gmail.com. Proposals should include a 300-word article abstract and a 300-word explanation to how your ethnographic research speaks to questions raised in the CFP. Full article manuscript drafts will be due by September 30, 2019 in advance of video conference draft workshops in Fall 2019. Participation in fall 2019 video conference workshops (dates and time TBD by group) and the 2020 SCE Fieldwork in Ethics interest session is required for accepted papers.