What’s Really Going on: Ethnographic Theology and the Production of Theological Knowledge

Abstract

Ethnographic theology, having shifted its focus away from theological traditions enshrined in texts toward theological traditions embodied in practice, has become the frontier at which multiple disciplinary issues are being worked out: particularly those related to questions of theological normativity, the relationship between everyday and academic theology, and the tensions that erupt between empirical and theological modes of knowledge production. This article presents ethnographic theology as a form of spiritual discipline that is less an ethnographic analysis of Christian practices than it is an ethnographic analysis from Christian practices. Ethnography offers theology an opportunity to reflexively discipline the very nature of its discourse as specifically religious discourse, while reinventing what ethnography is in a theological context from the ground up.

Keywords

theology ethnography ethnographic theology spiritual disciplines apprenticeship Christianity reflexivity representation

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