{"id":1092,"date":"2014-08-10T09:30:19","date_gmt":"2014-08-10T14:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/?p=1092"},"modified":"2016-12-01T11:01:02","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T16:01:02","slug":"read-this-book-august-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/2014\/08\/read-this-book-august-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"READ THIS BOOK August 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Each month, we ask a member of the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty to recommend a book they are currently reading. Our August recommendation is offered by Bonnie Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u201cNot a Snazzy Title But . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

Thoughts on Heather Walton\u2019s Writing Methods in Theological Reflection<\/em> (London: SCM Press, 2014)[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Writing Methods in Theological Reflection<\/em> (SCM Press, 2014) is not<\/em> the snazziest title, this is one of the more creative books I have read in a long time.<\/p>\n

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Bonnie Miller-McLemore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since I just did a blurb for the book, it is also fresh on my mind. \u201cOnly Heather Walton,\u201d I claim, \u201cwith her passion for literary creativity and her academic insight and imagination, could pull off a book that is at once <\/em>eminently useful for all who write theology and<\/em> intellectually astute.\u201d I end my blurb by simply stringing together adjectives: \u201cInnovative. Provocative. Profound. A pleasure to read. A game-changer.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know. Endorsements are always<\/em> effusive. But I\u2019m not exaggerating. Let me try to explain.<\/p>\n

First, I love how Heather writes. She writes beautifully. She is a practical theologian and religion and literature scholar who teaches at the University of Glasgow where I had the good fortune of spending two weeks as Robertson Lecturer in 2008. As her faculty website[ii]<\/a> tells you, she has \u201cpioneered research on the significance of literature in feminist theology\u201d (her first book is Imagining Theology: Women, Writing, and God<\/em>, T&T Clark, 2007), and she is currently working on a three volume series on theology and everyday life, beginning with a book on the new materialisms, God in Things<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As important, Writing Methods<\/em> offers incredibly useful suggestions and examples on how to write theology in fresh creative ways. Each of the first three parts contains four chapters in which the first chapter describes a particular method for writing self-reflexively\u2014autoethnography, journaling, and life writing\u2014and the next three chapters offer examples from her own research. These illustrative chapters alone are worth the price of the book.<\/p>\n

But so is Part 4 where she returns to larger questions about theology, phronesis<\/em>, wisdom, and poetics or the \u201cdevices through which authors create their texts\u201d (p. xxiv). So it would be an understatement to assume Writing Methods<\/em> merely helps get the first-person singular back into your writing. The book reimagines where theological knowledge lies and how students, faculty, and religious professionals alike might go about discerning and articulating it across a range of disciplines and venues. I can imagine using the book in a ministry course on vocation or in an advance research course with doctoral students.<\/p>\n

Maybe her own words say it better: \u201cMuch of what I write is entirely conventional, but in other fictive and elegiac pieces I am struggling to find forms of expression that are more able to bear the weight that theology does not seem able to carry at the current time. I am trying through them to bear testimony to \u2018things\u2019 about which direct speech seems currently not possible\u201d (p. 161).<\/p>\n

All I can say is: Keep doing what you\u2019re doing and the rest of us will continue to benefit. Or, as I said to Heather in an email, \u201cReading your book was inspiring. Affirmed for me the value of fresh ways of writing and of writing out of my own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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[i]<\/a> http:\/\/www.scmpress.co.uk\/books\/9780334051855\/Writing-Methods-in-Theological-Reflection<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[ii]<\/a>http:\/\/www.gla.ac.uk\/schools\/critical\/research\/researchcentresandnetworks\/literaturetheologyandtheartsatglasgow\/staff\/heatherforlta\/<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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Each month, we ask a member of the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty to recommend a book they are currently reading. Our August recommendation is offered by Bonnie Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture.           \u201cNot a Snazzy Title But . . . .\u201d Thoughts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1576,"featured_media":1097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[12,356,1050,324,112,121,1051],"class_list":["post-1092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-read-this-book","tag-bonnie-miller-mclemore","tag-heather-walton","tag-readthisbook","tag-reading","tag-religion","tag-theology","tag-vdsfaculty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1576"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2613,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions\/2613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}