You Don’t Look Like a Baptist Minister: An Autoethnographic Retrieval of ‘Women’s Experience’ as an Analytic Category for Feminist Theology

Abstract

This article constructs and deploys a set of autoethnographic narratives from the author’s experience as a Baptist minister to critically retrieve the category of ‘women’s experience’ for feminist theological construction. Autoethnography, as a response to the crisis of representation in the Humanities, uses personal narratives of the self to reveal, critique and transform wider cultural trends. It therefore provides helpful tools for analysing, critiquing and transforming theological thought and practice. Following the article’s methodological sections, the constructive sections use the crafted autoethnographies to re-frame Rowan Williams’s vision for how church and world co-constitute each other towards God’s just ends. Whereas Williams argues that this co-constitution occurs through processes of interactive transformative judgment, the feminist theological understanding argued for here founds the process instead on interactive, transformative grace.

Collective Joy: The Spirituality of the Community Big Band Wonderbrass

“…Autoethnography has been used in different disciplines, including music (Bartleet 2009;Bartleet and Ellis 2009;Spry 2010), 2 and increasingly in theological study (Walton 2014;Wigg-Stevenson 2017). Discussing it as an approach to theological reflection, Heather Walton articulates the hope that turning life's transformational experiences into narrative enables 'deeper perceptions to emerge' as 'epiphanies' (Walton 2014, p. 5).…”