In recent years, theologians have increasingly used ethnographic research methods to strengthen the connections between their theological constructions and the social practices they seek to impact. The migration of these methods into the theological context has raised important questions about theological normativity. This essay draws on the author's fieldwork in a Southern Baptist congregation in Nashville Tennessee to argue that the ethnographic intervention into traditional methods for producing theological knowledge shifts the mode of speech in which normative theological claims can be made from that of proclamation to an anti-hierarchical practice of conversation. The author proposes that ethnographic theologians can use the ethnographic research question to shape the normative weight of sources in the field and what types of normative claims can be made out of that fieldwork in the theological text. She argues that while such a shift in the understanding of theological normativity and, by extension, of theology itself has the potential to threaten methods seeking to preserve the authority of Christian speech in an increasingly post-Christendom context, that this more humble, collaborative approach is better suited to the interfaith, intercultural contexts of contemporary life, all of which face the reality of the contingency of all truth claims, including religious truth claims. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on radical theologies.
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.
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