Save the Date for the 9th Annual Center for Practical Theology Lecture!

Dr. Pat McLeod and Tammy McLeod publish Hit Hard

Dr. Pat McLeod (STH Practical Theology ’09) and Tammy McLeod recently published Hit Hard: One Family’s Journey of Letting Go of What Was—and Learning to Live Well with What Is. When their Zach collapsed on a high school football field, he sustained a traumatic brain injury that transformed his life. Hit Hard is the story of “both having and not having their son” and of navigating family and faith in the midst of unexpected heartbreak. We are grateful to Tammy and Pat for taking the time to talk with the Center of Practical Theology about ambiguous loss, the importance of stories, and Christians learning to grieve. 

Hit Hard is available wherever books are sold.

What inspired you to write about your experience? What were you hoping to share?

Tammy: I’ve experienced through deep suffering that God is present, and it is God’s nature to be near people when they are suffering. Then, the second thing for me is ambiguous loss. I didn’t know what that was before we lost our son to it. I hope for the world that this will eventually become a household term. I would love to see this book in every hospital, every counseling center, every addiction center, and every memory care unit. Basically, I hope those that are floundering in the midst of ambiguous loss, know what it is and be able to be resilient in it.

Pat: So, I’m trying to put back on my practical theology hat. This is a popular book that is not intellectually challenging or even scholarly. It is just a story, and it is becoming hugely popular. Yet, this is where the practical theology comes in; it is a story and we need stories. Our lives unfold like a story. Our moral learning occurs because of good stories. And ultimately, stories are what make sense and meaning out of our lives. The Bible itself is filled with stories. I believe that this story will validate some of the challenging experiences, emotions, and relationship dynamics that people face when they grieve any kind of loss, especially ambiguous loss. People who are in that will see themselves in this story and it will surface and soften some of those hard emotions, hopefully, so that there can be healing and health.Ultimately, we wrote this story because I don’t think any story makes sense of the tragedy in our lives like the Gospel does. The Gospel is the one story that can absorb these and give some kind of hope in the midst of the small stories of despair and tragedy that we otherwise live in. That is why I think the Church needs good stories. And I don’t know if we are good storytellers, but it is a true story and it is filled with some really good moments of redemption. Zach is an amazing person. His recovery, the person he is, and the way he blends the world of ability and disability is itself inspirational and it is worth telling that story.

Ambiguous loss is a relatively new term. Can you tell us a little bit more about ambiguous loss?

Pat: Ambiguous loss is the major theme of the book, and the person who named that term is Pauline Boss. And she said that the challenge of living with an ambiguous loss is that you have to learn to live well with both having and not having at the same time. That is a personally challenging task. You will typically do one or the other or neither.

When I became a Christian, I was initiated into evangelical Christian faith and I think we could have grieved if we just let ourselves do what comes naturally, but certain things in our theology told us we shouldn’t do that. For example, people like turning a funeral into a celebration. It sounds so right and so good, but Jesus actually wept at a funeral and he was angry. The description of him at Lazarus’s tomb was that he snorted at death. There are emotions of grief and lament that are important for us as humans.

This next question is related, but in what way, do you think the term ambiguous loss contributes to contemporary questions in practical theology or theology in general?

Tammy: We touched on the not having side of ambiguous loss, but let’s talk about the having side! Some people just write off a person, like the person is just gone. Zach is still here and he is the most happy and joyful person I know. He loves God more than anyone I know and prays more than anyone I know! For some people, when a person can’t talk, has no short-term memory, or needs one-on-one care, they just write him off. We need to remember that the person is still a person, and God made them and loves them.

Pat: There are a lot of themes around our story that are worthy of further theological reflection as a practical theologian. One of those is a theology of disability. We have seen certain attitudes we had about disability changed by Zach. Zach may be the most human person I know because although he can’t speak and has no short-term memory, he connects and gets people before they get themselves. And the world of disability has plenty of eschatological implications. Also, there are a lot of ecclesial questions that come up in terms of how the Church incorporates those among us with disabilities, how does it do it well, and when it does things that are actually harmful.

Tammy: Also, just the idea of ambiguity itself. There are a lot of things in the world that are ambiguous. Not until we were in the midst of ambiguous loss did I really realize this. But it can actually be a frame for a lot of things that are happening in the world.

Do you have a particular audience in mind that you would like to reach or connect with?

Tammy: Pastors don’t understand ambiguous loss. For five years, I kept reading books on grief and I couldn’t find an answer. There is no acceptance and no closure in ambiguous loss. So, the normal grief literature doesn’t work for people in our situation. So, I really hope that every single pastor has at least a 20-30-minute training on ambiguous loss. If that’s all they get, 20 minutes. Because pastors just don’t know how to help people in our situation. So I hope pastors in training learn about ambiguous loss so they can help people better.

Pat and Tammy McLeod serve as Harvard Chaplains for Cru, an interdenominational Christian ministry. Tammy is also the Director of College Ministry at Park Street Church in Boston. She received her MA in Spiritual Formation from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Pat holds an MA in Theological Studies from the International School of Theology, and an MA in Science and Religion and a PhD in Practical Theology from Boston University. Pat and Tammy have been married for more than three decades and are parents to four grown children.

Xochitl Alvizo and Gina Messina publish Women Religion Revolution

Dr. Xochitl Alvizo (MDiv. '07, PhD. Practical Theology '14) recently published the co-edited volume Women Religion Revolution with Dr. Gina Messina. Dr. Alvizo is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the area of Women and Religion and the Philosophy of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality. She dedicates her work to bringing a feminist focus to theology and to the study of religion, including feminist and queer theologies, congregational studies, ecclesiology, and the emerging church. In this blog post, Alvizo shares more about the importance of women's momentum in politics, the importance of women's publishing initiatives, and where she sees revolution rising now. We hope you'll also visit the Feminism and Religion blog, where Dr. Alvizo shares her inspiration, the process of collaboration, and her hopes for Women Religion Revolution on the Feminism and Religion blog in two posts: The Making of Women Religion Revolution and Women Religion Revolution and its Political Theological Orientation. 

Women, Religion, Revolution is available through Feminist Studies in Religion, Barnes and Noble Booksellers, and Amazon.

The 2018 elections were a record-breaking year for women in politics: 117 women were elected to Congress and nine to governorships. There were other firsts: Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, Reps. Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids became the first Native American women elected to Congress, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley became Massachusetts's first black congresswoman. Does this historic year raise any new reflections on the significance of Women Religion Revolution, especially given its intersections at politics and religion?

You know, women's liberation is a movement hundreds of years in the making. I was recently reading the 1980 republication of Women Church and State: The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex by Matilda Joslyn Gage and the detailed research Gage provides there regarding the intentional and systemic efforts by male-led society to control women - their voices, bodies, and participation - is just such a sobering reminder of the deep, deep roots of sexism and misogyny that we are up against. So changing this reality has necessarily been deep, slow work, and the wave of women entering elected office is part of its fruit. Early feminists, both those of the nineteenth and twentieth century, were stongly convinced that women's awakening to the reality of these systemic oppressions and the contra-reality of women's equal worth and dignity would have revolutionary implications. There are women who will do this revolutionary work - and I mean revolutionary in terms of indicating a "turning," the work toward fundamental change - from within the institutions already in place, at the boundary of them, and completely outside of them. All of these are necessary and valid options. We have to chip away at these deeply ingrained oppressive systems from all sides. These newly elected women in office, just as the individual women who contributed to Women Religion Revolution, are each doing their part in continuing the movement of women's liberation...which, to be clear, is human liberation - it is liberation for us all.

How are, or maybe why are, women's writing and publishing revolutionary?

In a world where the literary "canon" of almost every field is dominated by male voices - and in some cases exclusively so - publishing women's voices is a radical turn. In a very practical way the publication of women's writings is itself a disruption of things as they are and reflects real change. Now, when the content of the writing is also new in form, disruptive of the status quo, and contributes to the envisioning and creating of a new reality, that's even better! That is more of what we need and it is part of the deep work we must continue to do and we need to do it in ever more creative and disruptive forms. This is also why many early feminists saw women's liberation not just as a social revolution but a spiritual revolution. It requires us to tap into our deeper selves, the parts of our be-ing that have not been disciplined and colonized by all the oppressive "isms" so deeply embedded in our society and inherited throughout history. I'm telling you, this is why ours is deep, slow, work!

Where do you see revolutionary spirit and practice rising up - or preparing to rise - in the context of religion now?

Publicly, we see it in religious communities' activist participation in political protests, rallies, marches; in their creative ministries that bring attention to urgent social issues; in inter-religious collaborations and movement building. And more importantly, the true revolutionary spirit and practice in religious communities that I see taking place is manifesting as critical self-reflection. The willingness to take a deep critical look at the inheritance and biases that our religious traditions come with; to study and face the ugly truths of how our religious traditions and institutions, those we have often experienced to be life-saving, have been (and continue to be) death-dealing. Through book studies, speakers series, discussion groups (i.e. consciousness-raising groups), some congregations are daring themselves to see, to really see our collective and religious complicity in systems of oppression. This is difficult vulnerable work, which I think has the most revolutionary potential. Because as Mary Daly stated, "it isn't "prudent" for women [us all] to see...Seeing means everything changes; the old identifications and the old securities are gone." But this kind of destabilizing change is exactly what we need in order to uproot the deeply embedded "isms" our society and religious traditions continue to perpetuate. This critical self-reflection is necessarily part of the deep, slow work we must all do if we are to achieve liberative and lasting change. It is how our revolutionary spirit will be able to rise up in action and change; our religious communities can be a context in which we support one another to do this together.

More excerpts of reflection on Women Religion Revolution:

• From "The Making of Women Religion Revolution":

"The essays capture critical moments in women’s lives in which they identify that the way things are are not the way things have to be, and in turn are moved into action. Sometimes it is not always about a critical moment, per se, sometimes it is a larger ongoing reality – injustices around women’s reproductive rights and their rights over their own bodies; violent uses of power; human exploitation; the church’s failure to affirm the sacredness of all people in its language, symbols, and structures – just to offer a few examples. These ongoing realities of injustice lead the authors to draw from both feminist and religious resources to fuel their work to change these systems/structures. They see their death-dealing character and know that that passivity is not an option." See more at Feminism and Religion.

• From "Women Religion Revolution and its Political Theological Orientation":

"We wanted to complexify the religion/feminism dichotomy that often exists in the popular imagination; to up and expand the popular understanding of those terms to a broad audience...Volumes like this help mediate the politics of our differences in that it is a first step toward creating space – toward creating the conditions in which women can use the power of their voice to speak out loud and speak revolution into be-ing so as to continue building it. We have a critical need to bring the power of our voices together even while we leave space for one another; to honor each other’s journey while also actively finding the connecting threads that move us toward building a common critical political voice and vision, in a time when forces against our humanity are great....

"The volume is also...an invitation to all of us to keep on, to push further, and to hear our own deep wisdom voice speaking us to greater and more radical revolutions, turnings, in our own contexts, while also taking the whole cosmos into account, which is the challenge Carol Adams gives us in the foreword." See more at Feminism and Religion.

CPT Co-Director Bryan Stone publishes Finding Faith Today

We are grateful to Center for Practical Theology Co-Director Bryan Stone, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism, for taking the time to share insights from his recently published Finding Faith Today. Finding Faith Today presents the findings of a multi-year study on how people come to faith in the US context. The book sheds new light on how people come to faith and what sort of spiritual, practical, and social changes accompany this process.

What were some significant findings of Finding Faith Today?

One of the most significant findings was that most individuals who become Christian, whether Catholic, Evangelical, or Mainline Protestant, do so through a process of journeying. For most people, becoming a Christian doesn’t happen overnight, but it is, rather, a gradual process. Another major and related finding was the important role that congregations play in accompanying or companioning people through the process of becoming Christian. Our findings challenge the assumption that persons come to faith privately or on their own. Most people come to faith through participation in a community and through human relationships. Faith is communal and, in many cases, ecclesiological. This community might be in

the form of small groups, Bible studies, corporate worship, mission trips, or service groups, for example, but there is a powerful communal aspect of coming to faith through belonging to a community that is important across the diversity of religious traditions. Another finding was related to social issues. When it comes to finding faith and changing one’s mind on social issues, we found that people’s views are not fundamentally changed when they come to faith. Faith tends to confirm what they already believe, or, as is often the case, persons are attracted to and find a home in communities where they find likeminded persons. That is not to say there is not some powerful change in stances on social issues, and our study identifies where those changes are most significant.

What were some similarities and differences between the findings of your study and the study in England 30 years ago, on which your study is modeled?

In both studies, relationships are very important. Another similar finding is that many persons who make a new faith commitment, including most Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant new Christians, and a good number of Evangelicals, have always understood themselves to be Christian. Thus when some people come to faith, there may not be a dramatic change of religious identity. And when evangelizing or reaching out to persons not in the church, we should not assume that they don’t already think of themselves as Christian in some sense. This was slightly less true for Evangelicals, who tend to understand there to be a more marked change in identity. But it is truer for Evangelicals in the U.S. context than it was in the U.K. study. There is a strong nominal Evangelicalism in the U.S., especially in the Bible belt.

As noted above, one of our findings was the significance of the congregation. The congregation was one of the top three factors identified in coming to faith in our study. For some traditions, such as Unitarian Universalists or Mainline Protestants, it is the factor with the most significance. The U.K. study did not even include the congregation in its list of survey choices (though persons could write it in, I suppose). The congregation’s importance does show up in various ways in the U.K. study, with reference to other factors such as “minister” or “church activities,” but we were very impressed with how many persons in our study identified the congregation as either the most important or a supporting factor in their coming to faith.

The gradualism that is noted in my study is also different from the U.K. study. One contributing factor could be the age of participants. The participants in the U.K. study were age 16 and older, and my study only included adults over 18. We know that younger persons are more likely than older persons to come to faith suddenly. That doesn’t mean that younger persons are more likely to see coming to faith as instantaneous rather than a journey. It just means they do so more than older persons. Another interesting difference is that in the U.K. study, friendship was cited frequently as a factor in a person coming to faith, but friendship was not identified as a strong factor in my results. People just didn’t use that term as much in our study, though clearly friends were quite important in their coming to faith.

How do you hope the work will be engaged?

This study speaks to the powerful impact of relationships and journeying in coming to faith, which is important for churches to understand. Belonging is an aspect of coming to faith; it is not what happens after people come to faith. Also, people are interested in seeking faith and community. They are drawn in and invited by others, to be sure. But most people who come to faith understand themselves to have been active seekers. Also, we also can’t assume that people don't think of themselves as Christian or as persons without faith just because they don't go to church.